


The Dragon Rising

by MrProphet



Series: Demiurge [7]
Category: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 20:52:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10727016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	The Dragon Rising

_Bremen  
1997_

Alma Schmidt sat in her living room and smoothed down her skirt with quick, obsessive movements. In all her fifty-six years of life, she had never been as nervous as this. In the kitchen, the kettle whistled; Alma went through and poured the boiling water into the teapot. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed four and she walked quickly to the door, where she stood, waiting. No knock came.

Doubt began to creep into Alma's mind. Nervously, she advanced to the door and threw it open. A man in his early thirties stood outside, his eyes wide with shock and his hand raised to knock.

Alma gasped.

"H-Hello," the man said, nervously. "I was looking for..."

Alma smiled and tears sprang to her eyes. "It _is_ you!" she cried.

The man swallowed hard. "You know who I am?"

"Of course," she assured him. "Come inside. The tea should be just ready – I know how you hate coffee in the afternoons; so English – and I have some of your favourite cheesecake." She chuckled to herself. "I'm afraid that you'll have to manage most of that yourself; too rich for my tastes these days."

The man seemed lost as he walked past the woman into the house. The place had been freshly decorated in neutral colours in preparation for the upcoming sale, but she had delayed putting the place on the market, waiting for this moment. She had a solemn trust to discharge before she could leave her childhood home and this man was a part of it.

"I hardly dared to hope," he admitted. "So you're..."

"My name is Alma," she said, as she closed the door. "I suppose that you don't know that yet. It must have been difficult for you to track me down. I kept my name when I married, but I know that there are at least three other Schmidts within two blocks of here."

"Well, I guess I can hardly blame you for that," he told her phlegmatically. "So, your husband; is he..."

"I asked him to go out for the afternoon."

"Right. You're taking this rather better than I expected. I thought there might be trouble; screaming, accusations of insanity, possible threats of arrest."

Alma took him by the arm and led him through to the lounge. "Sit down and I'll bring the tea," she said. "There's a letter for you on the table; it should answer most of your questions." She left him and went to the kitchen door, then turned back to face him again. "It's good to see you again, Daddy," she said.

*

_Moscow  
2001_

Dr Svetlana Alexandrovna Markova walked into the lobby of a shabby old office block in one of the less fashionable areas of Moscow. She could feel eyes on her as she entered and she was acutely aware of the weight of the pistol in her shoulder holster. Some armed employees of the state might take comfort from the presence of a weapon at their side, but Svetlana had few illusions as to her own ability; she was required by regulations to carry a sidearm on duty, but it always felt to her as though she were issuing a challenge that she was simply not prepared to meet.

Svetlana turned to the address board and located the name she wanted; it was on the fifth floor and – naturally – the lift was broken. She trudged slowly up the stairs to the fifth-floor landing and faced the door of an office that had once had a glass panel, before it had been broken in and replaced with a cheap wooden board.

In place of a proper sign, a sheet of paper had been taped onto the board, with words printed on it on an ancient dot matrix and amended in thick, black marker:

FSB Drugs Trafficking Task-Force.  
Unit 66.  
****_Please note: We keep no drugs on_  
the premises. Special Agents carry  
less than 15 roubles...on a good day.

Svetlana knocked and then pushed on the door; the lock had been smashed, but a bolt on the far side of the door rattled securely. She heard footsteps approaching from within and then the bolt was drawn back and the door opened.

A young woman wearing a shapeless, third-hand suit over her bony frame and a listless expression on a half-starved face looked out. "You're not from Perestroika Pizza," she accused blandly.

"True enough," Svetlana agreed. She took out her ID and held it up. "Dr Svetlana Markova; Senior Research Officer, Special Directorate for Extrasensory Perception in Espionage and Counter-espionage."

"I am sorry," the woman drawled.

"Since I am only here because no-one else in the FSB will even bother to take phone calls from the SD, perhaps we can skip the personal abuse?"

The woman shrugged. "Sure," she agreed. "Senior Lieutenant Sabina Karpova, Unit 66. What can we do for you, Dr Markova? And please be brief; I see the pizza coming up behind you."

"It is more a question of what I can do for you," Svetlana replied. "I have a lead on Dragon."

Karpova looked Svetlana up and down, assessing her. "You like pepperoni?" she asked.

"Yes, I do."

Karpova nodded, then turned and walked away, leaving the door open behind her. "Come on in and meet the boss," she suggested. "And pay the pizza man!"

With a sigh, Svetlana took out her wallet and paid for the _two_ extra large pizzas. One was pepperoni, the other anchovy and she wondered why a share of the anchovy was not on offer, even to the founder of the feast. Then she followed Karpova into the dimly lit office and bolted the door behind her.

*

 _The Magic Hedge,_  
Montrose Point Army Base  
1944

Major General David Williams sat at his desk and pressed his fingers into his temples, feeling a migraine coming on. He had been having a bad day so far, in a bad week, during a pretty ropey month. Even for a career soldier the entire war would have to be considered an ‘off' period, but since his aide had gone on leave five months ago, things had gone from bad to worse. Karin had left everything in perfect order, even writing down much of the current information that had previously been stored only in her incredible brain, but her replacement was just not up to her job. Really, Williams needed _two_ assistants to replace her and the one man attempting the thankless task had now become totally lost, which meant that the task of coordinating the actions of one half of the Office of Secret Action's highly-specialized field agents had changed from being a challenge to a trial of Herculean proportions.

All of this was only made worse when the agents in need of coordinating chose to fight him. Major Duncan O'Neill of the US Army Air Forces was easy enough to handle; a professional soldier and highly experienced clandestine operative, he knew how to follow orders – although admittedly on occasions he chose not to – and he was a part of the regular chain of command. If a General said jump, Duncan O'Neill enquired as to the optimum height rather than assaying a philosophical discourse on the nature of the act of jumping. The same could not be said of Drs Sally Carter and Mathias Jackson.

The latter in particular – an archaeologist and adventurer, incredibly brilliant and utterly infuriating – was a throbbing pain in Williams' head. The fact that he was directly responsible for the absence of the industrious Karin – having rather thoughtlessly fathered her three-month-old son, some months _before_ marrying her – did nothing to endear him to the General. Williams would not even have bothered to call him if not for the fact that he was undeniably the country's foremost expert on Nazi occultism and on one Nazi occultist in particular.

Sally Carter was also an expert, not on occultism but on theoretical physics and in particular on high-energy fields. A former disciple of the publicly vilified Nikola Tesla, her work with Dr Stephan Kawalsky in the past year would have revolutionised the understanding of superconductors and telemetrics...if only anyone outside of their department at the OSA ever heard of it. Like Mathias Jackson, Sally Carter had a young child to consider and neither of them was keen to take another trip to Nazi Germany.

"I have important work to do," Carter insisted. "My experiments are at a crucial stage!"

"I was in the middle of a dig in New Mexico," Jackson added. "We've put everything on hold while I'm here and it's costing us; and we don't have the SS Paranormal Division's budget!"

Even O'Neill was being difficult. "General, with all due respect to my erstwhile comrades-in-arms," he said, and Williams was fairly sure that he meant it, "I think we really should keep the full-on fieldwork for the military professionals."

At that, naturally, the whole thing descended into a free-for-all. Fortunately, Williams had anticipated this. He signalled his temporary aide, Sergeant Fox, to dim the lights and switch on the projector. As they became aware of the face on the screen, the three operatives fell silent, as Williams had known they would. They face would have had an impact on most people – the woman in the picture coupled film star looks with an electrifying charisma which was amply conveyed through the photographic medium – but it was not her appearance that had this effect on the team before him.

"Mariana Veidt," Jackson said, ruefully.

"The witch," Carter added.

"These pictures were taken approximately one month ago," Williams explained. "It seems that Miss Veidt was successfully excavated from the cave-in in Antarctica, Dr Jackson," he added.

Jackson shrugged. "She seemed to have gained superhuman strength from somewhere," he noted. "Why not superhuman endurance?"

"Even leaving aside Dr Jackson's more outrageous claims," Williams said, wishing that he really could, "the opinion of the OSA Executive Committee is that Miss – or, as she is calling herself now, _Doctor_ – Mariana Veidt is one of the most dangerous women in the world; if not one of the most dangerous people."

"Does that really need saying separately?" Carter asked archly.

"This woman is currently active in Bavaria," Williams said, forging on regardless, "conducting experiments that we believe relate to some manner of sonic weapon. We wouldn't have recalled the three of you to active service, except that the Office is currently stretched rather thin in the European theatre. We _did_ send another team to infiltrate Miss Veidt's base at Castle Falkenstein, but we lost contact with them ten days ago. We need to send someone else in and the Cataclysm team have three great advantages: firstly, that you have encountered Veidt before; second, that between you, you possess the skills to deal with most of the military, scientific and paranormal challenges that this mission will involve."

"Only most of them?" Mathias asked.

"And thirdly..." Williams began.

"We're not doing anything else at the moment?" O'Neill suggested.

"Quite."

"Dr Carter, I know you have your son to consider," Williams said.

Carter sighed. "I do what I do for my son," she assured him.

"And I know you also have a child, Dr Jackson. Oh, God, do I know that you have a child," he muttered.

"Yes, General."

"Any plans to return my aide?" Williams asked.

"No, General," Jackson assured him, "although if she lets me take this mission, I'll probably have to stop home and look after Melbourne to make it up to her."

"You'll do it then?" Williams asked.

"I expect I'm asking for trouble, but I'm in. I doubt whether anyone else understands just _how_ dangerous she is. Just give me time to speak to my wife and I'll meet you at the plane."

Williams nodded his head in satisfaction. "Alright," he said. "Then we will continue with the briefing."

*

_Pfronten, Bavaria  
Five days later_

Commandant Amy Kawalsky, assassin for the Temporal Counterinsurgency Group, lay in the undergrowth, facing the hut where she had stayed two nights before. She was alone now, but at that time she had been in the company of Tom Keeler, her partner – in life, work and bed – and their enigmatic ally, Gretel. Although they had left the hut unoccupied, there were lights under the blinds now and a curl of smoke from the chimney. Behind her, the bracken crackled.

"What do you think?" Amy asked.

"Old friends," Tom replied. He lay down beside her and proffered a small device. "Recognise it?"

"A tripwire alarm," Amy realised. "I've seen one like it before, but..."

"Last year," Tom told her. "Hammond's friends. Check your tracker."

Amy did as she suggested. In addition to Tom, a second temporal trace showed on the display...less than ten feet away to their left.

As one, the two of them turned, levelling their carbines.

"Come out!" Tom directed.

"I have you both covered!" the reply came, but a slight uncertainty suggested that he had been caught just before getting into position. Tom was glad; he knew the voice and with the advantage of position, the man could have taken them both.

"Commander O'Neill?" Amy called.

There was a pause. "Captain Kawalsky?"

"Captain?" Tom asked.

Amy took a deep breath, and then lowered her carbine, signalling for Tom to do the same. "It's _Colonel_ O'Neill, isn't it!" she called. "You're with Dr Jackson?"

The bushes rustled and the tall, grizzled figure of the man they knew as Praetorian Commander emerged. "You've seen something of Daniel?" he asked.

"Practically all of him," Amy replied. "But that's neither here nor there," she added hurriedly.

O'Neill sighed. "Come down to the hut," he invited. "You can tell me what he's got himself into now and explain exactly where you sprang from."

 

Colonel Jack O'Neill watched the woman as they walked down to the hut. She _looked_ like Amy Kawalsky – apart from the hair – but she moved differently; wary, and leaning away from him as though she were afraid of him. The young man with her had the same wariness, but less fear of O'Neill.

"So...not the Amy Kawalsky I know?" Jack asked.

Amy shook her head. "Our timeline has been squeezed out," she told him. "That was your doing, in part; you helped George Hammond to block the signal which would have created our world."

Jack cocked his head on one side. "So...I'm not the Praetorian Commander anymore?"

"You never were," Amy assured him. "Not now. Oh; this is Commandant-Lieutenant Thomas Keeler. I believe he contributed to your opposite number's official biography."

"You were a pleasure to write for," Keeler assured him. "Laconic, I mean. There's nothing worse than a commander who insists that his trite words of wisdom be recorded for posterity."

"Glad to be of service. So...You two are propagandists?" Jack asked, confused.

"I used to be," Keeler replied, "and Amy was a historical analyst, before we transferred to the Executive Action Division."

"Executive..." Jack felt a shiver run down his spine. "You're assassins?"

"Temporal impact adjustors," Amy corrected, with the faintest hint of embarrassment. "We...change the degree to which people impact on history."

"You kill them?"

Keeler shrugged. "We used to. We're sort of retired. Well, as retired as assassins can get," he admitted.

"Are you disappointed?" Amy asked quietly.

"That would be kind of hypocritical," Jack assured her. "I'm just surprised. I never pictured Amy Kawalsky as professional killer material."

They reached the door to the hut and Jack rapped out a simple code. After a moment, a bolt was drawn back and the door opened by a wiry, blonde woman with tanned skin and pale grey eyes. She held a pistol in her right hand.

"It's alright, Inge," Jack told her. "They're friends...I think. Amy and Tom."

Inge looked the two newcomers over and then nodded. She snapped on the safety catch and tucked the pistol into her belt. "Please come in," she said, with forced politeness. "There's stew on the stove."

 

Inge moved to the stove while Jack settled their ‘guests' at the table. They had a hard look that worried her; it reminded her of the SS operatives that she had worked with before she had met Jack. Perhaps sensing her disquiet, Jack walked over and slipped an arm around her waist.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

"I don't trust them," Inge whispered.

Jack leaned close to her ear and whispered: "Neither do I, but it was a fight I couldn't win."

Inge reached up and twisted a hand into the front of Jack's shirt and leaned her head against his shoulder. "Be careful," she warned.

"Hey. I've got you to watch my back, haven't I?" he reminded her. "Keep an eye on them for me."

"Yes, Jack," Inge replied.

She watched him walk back to the table and then turned her gaze on the newcomers while she stirred the stew. The woman was pretty, which was enough for Inge to take against her, but at least she seemed to be attached to the man she was with and very wary of Jack. The man was handsome; he looked back at Inge and his gaze was kind, but she had seen his eyes when she faced him with a gun and knew that he could be deadly. Weak and naive she might be, but she had spent long enough in the company of killers to know such people on sight.

"So," Jack said. "Daniel."

"He's in the castle," Amy replied.

"Rats and chains?" Jack asked.

"Silk sheets and fur rugs."

"Ah. One of _those_ imprisonments."

Amy gave a crooked smile. "The Imperiatrix was always fond of him. And of his father," she added.

"And his grandfather," Tom added.

"The Imperiatrix?" Jack was baffled.

"Mariana Veidt, Lady President of the Confederated Empire of America," Amy explained. "Or plain Frau Dr Mariana Veidt as she is at present. In time – in this time _line_ – she will most likely depose Hitler, usually in 1945, and become the Supreme Reichsführerin, ruling over a shattered Earth."

"Shattered?" Inge asked.

"There was a reason why even those who felt doubts regarding her motives still served," Tom assured her. "Dr Jackson's historical analysis work showed two real options – the tyranny of the Empire...or the devastation of the Reich."

"Jackson?" Jack asked with a groan. "So it was Daniel..."

"It was Daniel who identified the dominant tracks of history," Amy acknowledged. "But you come from a world without Veidt; without Ahriman," she added. "For you, the Goa'uld are something that only happens on other planets."

Jack gave a deep sigh. "Goa'uld?"

"I'm afraid so."

"And this all has to do with the Fowler's Coffin?"

"The what?" Amy asked.

"A stone casement," Inge explained. "A sarcophagus of sorts, designed to contain a living tesseract. I would imagine that you used it to travel through time. You might know it as the Dahak Casket."

Tom nodded. "So, you call it the Fowler's Coffin in your world?" he asked Jack.

"We don't call it anything," Jack replied. "In my world, we'd never heard of it; ‘Fowler's Coffin' is Inge's term. Don't be fooled by her advanced knowledge of transtemporal dynamics; I found Inge when I got here last year. She just happens to be ahead of her time."

Inge blushed, furiously and turned back to her stew.

"Well, she's right," Tom agreed. "And we do call it the Dahak Casket."

"And it's here?" Jack asked again.

"Yes," Amy agreed.

Jack nodded, sombrely. "Nice to know we're on the right track at last. We've searched most of the rest of Germany in the past year, but when we heard that the town here was wiped out it sounded like the sort of thing we were looking for."

"You met Garth then," Amy noted. "We haven't seen him since Gretel sent him on his way; was he alright?"

Inge narrowed her eyes. There was some weight behind Amy's words; a layer of guilt that did not sit easily with her profession of concern.

"He was fine," Jack assured them. "We gave him some food to keep him going. He mentioned this Gretel," he added. "He was very worried about his friend Magda and her sister; didn't feel this Gretel really cared about them."

"She's...an odd sort; Gretel, I mean," Amy admitted, blushing. "I...I tried to rescue Daniel from the castle," she admitted. "I wanted him to come and leave the two girls behind. He told me that his Amy wouldn't even have asked."

Inge saw Tom wind his hand supportively around Amy's. She turned and began ladling the stew into bowls.

Jack shot a look at Tom, who gave a slight shrug. Jack nodded: "Daniel's always been a little hazy on the matter of tough decisions," he told Amy. "You tried to do what you thought was right; he just holds you to a higher standard than might be reasonable. Trust me; he does the same thing to me. It can be tough to live up to that."

Amy gave a grateful smile and Inge could feel the affection that Jack felt towards her, or perhaps to the woman whom she resembled. Inge strode over and slammed a bowl of stew down in front of Amy, then placed another, more gently, in front of Tom. She went back for two more bowls and then came back to sit by Jack.

Jack reached out under the table and patted Inge's leg reassuringly. "Thanks," he said.

"You're welcome," she assured him.

"Anyway," Jack went on, "we've been tracking the Coffin – or Casket – as best we can since I fell through the tesseract a year ago. This was our first serious lead."

Amy nodded. "I think the Casket has been sealed for most of that time," she explained. "Ahriman seems to be experimenting with ways of using the Casket to sow destruction. Apparently she's destroyed whole worlds before now."

"Whole worlds?" Inge gasped, appalled.

"The effect – the rage – is reciprocal," Amy said impatiently. "But the thing is..."

"Reciprocal," Inge whispered.

"Yes. It means..."

"That the tesseract – this Dahak entity – engenders the rage in minds around it, and then feeds on the very aggression and violence that it creates. The power builds and the aggression increases; the effect spreads, as it did in the castle where we were experimenting with the tesseract." Inge frowned. "But victims of the effect have almost superhuman strength and they attack each other; they would wipe each other out and soon there wouldn't be anything left alive inside the field; the effect wouldn't sustain...would it?"

Amy stared at the woman in amazement, realising that what she had taken for obtuseness was in fact a level of intellectual abstraction to which she could not even aspire.

"Would it?" Inge asked, almost desperately.

*

Daniel paced up and down in his palatial quarters. Every time he tried to rest, the luxury of the room caused a pang of guilt to stab through him and so he had been on his feet for hours, trying to work out what to do. He was increasingly of the opinion that he should have gone with Amy when he had the chance and tried to help the girls later.

The door opened and he ran towards it with some half-formed intention of pushing past the maid and making a break for freedom, but it was no maid who entered and he drew up short before Mariana was forced to take action.

"Hello, my love," she said, and all of the coquettish glee seemed to have returned to her voice.

"Not still angry?" he asked.

Mariana shrugged. "Turning my weapon on Iblis was...most amusing," she explained, her lips curling into a smile. "When she returned from her hunt to report that she had slain her entire squad, I must admit that I laughed. You have a wicked sense of humour, my darling."

"I had rather hoped she would be killed," Daniel admitted.

"No doubt, but I would not have kept her as my servant if she were not a most formidable creature. It is almost a shame that I sent her out with my special commandos; our regular troops would have been most taken aback by _her_ reaction to the Dahak energies. Fortunate also that she was not with the children," she added. "Your gambit showed a pleasing disregard for their safety."

"I knew the weapon was not aimed at the castle itself," Daniel assured her.

"Indeed?" Mariana searched his face for signs of deception and found none. "A pity. I had hoped that I might have unlocked a more ruthless streak within you. As it is, Frau Zelig's body is somewhat damaged; if I release my Iblis to take another host – as you may understand she is most eager to do – I think that poor Anile Zelig will die. It seems a harsh fate; she is no innocent, but she has never harmed a soul without Iblis to guide her hand."

Daniel bit back a sour response. He knew that Mariana was goading him and that he was close to giving her the satisfaction that she sought.

Mariana smiled at him and gestured for a maid to enter and place a covered tray on the table. "This is Marta," she told Daniel. She slung an arm around the girl's shoulders, then swiftly looped it about her neck and dug her fingers into the soft flesh of Marta's throat.

Marta was clearly used to such treatment and barely even flinched.

"What are you doing?" Daniel demanded.

"Dear Daniel," Mariana sighed. "Marta is one of my most trusted servants. She has a husband in Pfronten and a little daughter. I will be sending Marta to you with food from time to time and I shall not always be at liberty to come with her. If you attempt to escape, I am sure that she will try to stop you; should she fail, I will kill her." She smiled, sweetly. "Rush her and escape and you will have sweet Marta's death on your conscience. Do we understand each other?"

"Yes," Daniel replied bleakly.

"Good." Mariana released the serving girl's throat. "Run along, Marta; you have duties."

"Yes, ma'am," Marta replied. She gave a short curtsey and then left the room. Again, she gave no sign that she considered her treatment to be harsh or unusual.

"Such a sweet girl," Mariana said. "Of course, you may decide that her life is insignificant next to the millions you have already condemned."

"I haven't condemned anyone," Daniel told her. "You can't give the Nazis victory; not at this stage of the war. You'll lose and become the forgotten footnote of history I know you to be."

"Will I?" Mariana asked, innocently. "Perhaps you should do a little research before you jump to any conclusions," she suggested. She reached into her jacket and took out a small recording sphere, which she set beside his supper tray. "You may find the information on this device illuminating."

"I'm sure I shall," Daniel agreed, moving towards the sphere, but Mariana caught his arm. His skin burned at her touch and he hated himself for it.

"Not yet, my love," she murmured. "After I am finished with you."

Daniel swallowed hard. "I wouldn't want my supper to get cold," he said.

Mariana twisted his wrist and forced his body up against hers. "The supper is salad and cold meats," she assured him. She pushed her free hand under his shirt and up his chest.

"I hate you!" Daniel hissed.

Mariana's chuckle was triumphant as well as sensuous. "Yes," she agreed. "And you _burn_ with it." She thrust him backwards and he felt his feet leave the floor as he was propelled to the bed. Mariana stalked after him, her movements slow and deliberately cruel, like those of a cat playing with a dying mouse.

*

_Moscow  
2001_

Karpova's boss was Major Vladimir Djerovich, a veteran of the KGB, Border Service and now the FSB. He shared the pepperoni with Svetlana, while Karpova consumed the anchovy and onion pizza with a gusto that belied her bony frame.

Djerovich was almost sixty years old, but still strong and robust despite a lifetime of smoking black, unfiltered cigarettes like the one that smouldered in the corner of his mouth, even as he ate his share of the pizza. As long as Svetlana could stare at the dog-end, he never seemed to draw on it and she wondered if this was why the smoke had never harmed his health, because it had never got as far as the inside of his mouth, let alone his lungs.

There was a photograph on Djerovich's desk, showing six men in dark suits and long coats, standing in front of a three-tonne truck. A young woman in a white dress sat on a folding chair in front of the men. There were crates in the truck and one had been smashed open, revealing a mass of dark, brick-shaped packages. Svetlana knew that she was looking at a photograph of a successful drug raid.

"Unit 66," Djerovich said, spotting her interest. His voice was heavy with nostalgia. "We were the Moscow Untouchables; Colonel Valentin's secret weapon in the fight against the drugs' trade. All of us had lost someone to that filthy business; friends, brothers, lovers." He touched a fond hand to the photograph, stroking the young woman's cheek. "Even poor Leva had lost her fiancée when his coastal patrol tried to stop a group of smugglers. None of us would ever have sold out to those bastards; not for any money."

He tapped one of the young men, a fresh-faced, good-looking twenty-something with a black, unfiltered cigarette in one corner of his grinning mouth and a hand on Leva's shoulder. "That was me," he explained. "I was a handsome devil, back in 1966; if you can believe it. That was before it went bad, of course."

Karpova desperately waved her arms behind the senior agent's back.

"What happened?" Svetlana asked.

Karpova slapped a palm to her forehead.

Djerovich picked up the photograph. "They could not buy us," he explained, "and so they bought our superiors. We were investigated for corruption and evidence was planted to incriminate Colonel Valentin. They said he had been allowing certain dealers to continue to operate in exchange for money: A filthy lie!"

He turned and spat on the floor. Karpova grimaced and went for a cloth.

"Then they said that he had been seeing a known drug dealer's sister," Djerovich went on. "That...That was true, but _she_ was an innocent. But it looked bad for the Colonel and he was suspended while the investigation was carried out. Three days later he...They said that he shot himself; I do not believe it and I never have. Then Anatol was killed during a raid and Volodya was crippled in a car accident. That left just three of us and Leva.

"Konrad had just married and threats were made against his family. He decided that the risks were too high and he quit in 1971. Marko, Leva and I kept on working as best we could, but we were too few. Marko was transferred to counterterrorism, but I had been very vocal in my criticism of the handling of Colonel Valentin's case and they decided to punish me by leaving me here."

"And Leva?" Svetlana asked.

Djerovich stood and walked to the window.

"They were married in 1978," Karpova whispered. "She died three years ago of lung cancer; secondary inhalation," she added, almost inaudibly.

Svetlana winced. "What did _you_ do to end up here?" she asked.

"I volunteered," Karpova replied. "My father is Konrad Karpov, the second on the left," she added, indicating the photograph. "I grew up on tales of Unit 66 and..." She tailed off, perhaps unwilling to express her disappointment in the reality in front of her boss. "Maybe we should talk business?" she suggested hopefully.

"Yes," Djerovich agreed, without enthusiasm. He turned back to face Svetlana and returned to his desk. "You said that you knew something about Dragon."

"I said that I had a lead on the case," Svetlana corrected. "I actually know very little about Dragon itself."

Djerovich sighed. "Officially, neither do we," he admitted, "but I still have a few contacts and the Karpov family are well-connected. Sabina; will you explain to the good doctor?"

"Yes, Sir," Karpova agreed. She turned to face Svetlana. "Dragon is the name of a new street drug, or rather one of the names; colloquially it has a number of aliases: cut, angel fire, angel blood, inferno. It doesn't have a technical name yet, but the big dealers trade it as Dragon."

"I have heard of angel blood," Svetlana noted, "although I thought that was simply a disassociative anaesthetic, similar to phencyclidine."

Djerovich shook his head. "This is the official line, fostered by the fact that the observable effects are superficially similar in some users," he said. "Users experience feelings of disconnection and empowerment; insensitivity to pain, paranoia."

"However," Karpova continued, "the similarity stops there. Dragon is not chemical in origin, but botanical; it is based on a plant alkaloid. In terms of effect, PCP users rarely become violent unless pressured or forcibly detained; almost all Dragon users _do_. In most cases, use of the drug triggers a brief, but intense high, characterised by stillness and calm, followed by a period of extreme aggression. The user lashes out at anything around him – or her – and exhibits superhuman strength."

Svetlana chuckled. "You mean an appearance of superhuman strength," she corrected. "A person on PCP can break handcuffs and punch through plate glass, but only because they do not care what harm they are doing themselves in the process."

"No, Dr Markova," Djerovich assured her. "Dragon users exhibit _genuine_ enhanced strength and there is some evidence of boosted sensory acuity."

"Fascinating," Svetlana whispered.

"You will understand that the military are _very_ keen to trace the source of this drug," Djerovich noted. "That is why Unit 66 is the only element of the Drug Trafficking Task-Force assigned to the case and why we have had to discover most of this information for ourselves."

"Some of it through less than official means and channels," Karpova added.

"General Pavlov's Special Projects Division don't want us to even have a chance to stop the supply before Military Intelligence can gain control of the source," Djerovich explained.

"Is that why no-one else would speak to me about it?" Svetlana asked.

"Most probably," Karpova agreed. "Did they forward you on to us?"

"They kept redirecting us into brick walls," Svetlana replied. "Lines going dead, infinite muzak and so forth. Eventually someone slipped up, however, and mentioned Unit 66. I looked up your number, but..."

Karpova chuckled. "I apologise for your pains," she said, lifting the telephone handset and giving it a little shake. "No-one's paid the bills on this thing for years. Actually, it's almost flattering that someone bothered to come and find us in this old place, even out of desperation. But I'm not sure what you could have to tell us if you didn't know anything about Dragon," she added.

Svetlana shrugged. "Well, I think _I_ see how things fit together now. You see, one of our SD projects has been tracing historical references to warriors who were capable of entering a state of religious frenzy and performing superhuman feats in this state. We had a lead on a caste of shamanic warriors in southern Siberia and we assigned an agent to investigate the stories. He filed several reports connecting the stories to the use of a local plant – the snow lily – with psychotropic properties, then we lost track of him. He sent us one last report before he disappeared; a single word."

"Dragon," Djerovich said, and in a moment the years of self-pity fell away. His back straightened and his saggy face hardened in determination. "And...the military don't know about it? General Pavlov's SPD...?"

"General Pavlov doesn't like the SD much," Svetlana assured him. "The feeling is mutual. We wouldn't go to him and he wouldn't have listened if we had."

"Then...we can beat him to it," Djerovich said.

"Not a friend of yours then?" Svetlana asked.

Karpova grimaced. "It was Lieutenant-Colonel Pavlov – as he was – who prosecuted Colonel Valentin," she explained.

"Would you care to join Unit 66 for a trip to Siberia, Dr Markova?" Djerovich asked.

"Please," Svetlana demurred. "Transportation is on me."

*

_Bavaria,  
1944_

Amy and Tom went through to the second bedroom to ‘settle in' – or in other words, to speak in private and decide whether or not to trust Jack and Inge – and Inge gathered up the bowls. They would leave this place, probably in the morning, but Inge insisted on washing up – scouring the dishes and pans in a bowl full of cold well water – as diligently as though she were in her own home. Jack approved of such care, which would after all reduce their traceable presence, but he found her refusal to let him help her upsetting. She still saw him as her protector and insisted on repaying him in service and that made him question just what she considered to be a service.

Inge had come a long way since their first meeting. Her desire to return to the fold had left her swiftly, and she no longer quailed when he got angry with his situation. That was a blessing; he had felt like such a monster for the first few months. He hated being trapped in this time, helpless to return to his home or to find his friends; he had grown short-tempered and Inge had been afraid of him. In time, however, she had realised that he was not angry with her; that even if he had been, he would not have harmed her. Somehow, when she stopped being afraid of his anger, his anger was lessened.

She had changed physically as well as emotionally; she had put on weight and her skinny frame had gained muscle mass. Living outside for the first time in her life had given her ashen skin a healthy tan, although her eyes now looked alarmingly pale in her bronzed face. A woman who had grown exhausted after a few minutes of struggling through the woods could now have trekked over hard terrain all day, if she had not insisted on pretending that she had a stitch a few minutes before Jack's dodgy knee would have forced them to halt. She had also ceased to be delicate and pretty; she was beautiful now and, when she let it show, she was strong.

His thoughts were interrupted when the bedroom door flew open and Amy emerged, armed and armoured.

Jack reached for his P90. "What the hell...?"

"Temporal energy readings," Amy explained. "Two signatures, heading straight for us from the south."

"Two?" Jack asked.

Amy nodded. "Probably a counterinsurgency team. Tom is watching the back of the hut, but we should be able to take them before they break cover."

"No!" Jack snapped, but he picked up the P90 and headed for one of the windows. "I have two more friends who might be here in the past. We wait until we can see them. Inge, can you pass..."

Before he could finish, Inge had pulled the field glasses from Jack's pack and passed them to him.

"Thank you," Jack said.

Amy grinned.

 

Tom caught a brief flash of motion on infrared, then there was nothing. "Something to the rear," he reported. "Just a glimpse."

" _Probably a fox,_ " Amy replied. " _No temporal signature to the north_."

"Amy, my love, we've been shot at by more people from this time than from any other," he reminded her.

" _Stay alert then; and try not to get too sentimental, sweetheart._ "

"As you say," Tom agreed. He heard a sound, like a twig cracking and he leaned carefully out of the window.

Something thin and cold touched his throat.

 

Shapes moved on the edge of the forest, one fair, the other dark; both dressed in rough jackets and scarves.

"I can take them," Amy whispered.

"No."

The two figures came closer; their clothes were unfamiliar and the woman's hair was much too long, but there was no mistaking the way that they moved.

"Carter!" Jack called out. "Teal'c!"

The two looked up at the call and then moved forward more swiftly.

"Colonel!" Carter called.

Jack grinned and hurried to the door. Inge moved after him, while Amy remained ready at the window.

Teal'c came forward first and clasped Jack's arm. "It is good to see you, O'Neill," he said.

"And you, Teal'c. Carter; glad you finally got here," Jack said. "Well...actually, I'm not glad you're here, exactly. Not for you, anyway."

"I understand," Sam assured him. "And we've been here a while, actually."

"Three years now, isn't it?" Jack asked.

Sam blinked. "How could you know...?" She began and then stopped and stared in silence as Inge emerged from the hut.

"Hello, Major Carter," Inge said softly. She walked up to Jack's side and looped her arm through his.

"You?" Carter gasped. "Sir; this woman..."

"Dr Weiss has given me every reason to believe that she has changed her...or maybe just _gained_ a political and moral allegiance," Jack assured his comrades. "We can trust her. Which is more than I can necessarily say for the two inside," he added in a lower tone. "Any more with you?" he asked.

"Just one," Sam replied. She put her fingers in her mouth and gave a shrill whistle. "She'll be here in a moment," she promised.

"Colonel O'Neill!"

Sam looked up in surprise at the call of warning. "Is that...?"

"Not really, no," Jack replied. "Come on."

They hurried into the hut, Jack retrieving his arm from Inge as they went. Inside, they saw that Amy was aiming her carbine past her partner at a young woman with a scarred face, who had a knife held at Tom's throat.

"Friend of yours?" Jack asked.

"Colonel O'Neill, this is Lotte Leman," Sam replied.

"I know you," Inge said. "From the castle."

Lotte turned a cold gaze on Inge and the scientist fell silent.

"Okay," Jack said. "Kawalsky, put up the weapon; we're all friends here."

"Not while she has a knife at my partner's throat, she isn't," Amy replied.

"It's alright, Amy," Tom assured her. "If she was going to kill me, she would have done it already."

"She lowers the knife, _then_ I lower the rifle!" Amy insisted.

"Lotte," Sam said softly.

The girl took a step away from Tom and the knife was gone; Jack could not have said for sure what had happened to it. With a sigh of relief, Tom stepped forward, keeping himself between Amy and Lotte until he could lay his hand on the barrel of her carbine.

"It's alright," he promised her. "No damage; no vengeance needed."

Amy stared into his eyes for a long moment before she allowed herself to lower the weapon. All at once, the tension fled. It was as though the entire room had been holding its breath and now let out a collective sigh of relief.

"So what brings you here?" Jack asked.

Sam took out what was obviously some sort of lashed-up monitoring device, not dissimilar to the SGC's standard-issue naquadah scanner. "Chasing time signatures," she explained. "Also, we ran into a lad called Garth who said he's sent lots of people to this hut who were all asking about the Coffin."

"Well, like I say; glad you could make it," Jack assured her. "Alright; introductions: Major Samantha Carter and Teal'c; Dr Inge Weiss you know and Commandant Kawalsky you know by analogue; this is her boyfriend Tom. They kill people," he added. "Amy and Tom, this is Teal'c and I suspect you know Major Carter in some shape or form. This one is a scientist."

Amy nodded. "Ours is the Technical Director of the Temporal Counterinsurgency Group," she acknowledged. "I like your hair, Ma'am."

Sam gave a rueful smile. "Thanks. And this is Lotte Leman; she kills Nazis."

"In which case, glad to meet you," Jack said. "Alright; now we're all together except for Daniel who is a prisoner, sort of, in that castle. Our objectives are to rescue Daniel, lock down a dangerous alien artefact, avoid the attention of the Nazis, neutralise a terrestrial Goa'uld presence, avert any and all potential futures in which said Goa'uld rules the Earth with an iron fist and, if at all possible, get back to 1957 Milwaukee or points forward. I open this one to the floor," he declared. "Any suggestions?"

"Tea?" Tom offered.

"It's a start," Jack allowed.

*

Mariana slipped from Daniel's bed once she was finished with him, dressed quickly and then left. Daniel was weary, but instead of letting himself drift into a tormented slumber, he forced himself to rise and move to the table. He picked at his lunch and examined the device that Mariana had left. As he had expected, the recorder was touch activated and as his fingers brushed across the smooth surface the sphere lit from within and a shimmer of light appeared above it, resolving into the holographic image of a man with a battered and bloodied face; a long, heavy blade rested beneath his chin and his eyes were filled with fear.

A Goa'uld voice boomed from out of shot: " _Begin_."

The man swallowed hard. " _My name is..._ "

" _Unimportant._ "

" _I am the last survivor of the Tserani people, who occupied this planet until, in their folly, they defied the will of the Great Lord Sokar. When I am gone, this record will be all that remains of the Tserani._

" _It is almost three years since the comet approached our world,_ " he said.

The man worked a control in front of him and his image was replaced by a diagram of a planetary orbit. It was a testament to Sam's patient instruction that he was able to look at this diagram and judge that the ‘year' mentioned previously would have been slightly shorter than Earth's, but not by much. As Daniel watched, a trace appeared and moved towards the planet.

" _We did not know at the time that this ‘comet' was an artificial craft, but many saw it as an ill omen. Then, at its closest pass to our world, a part of the comet broke away._ "

The image zoomed in as the ‘comet' approached the planet, so that as it moved in its sweeping orbit around the alien globe, he could clearly see a fragment break off and plunge towards the unsuspecting world.

Now Daniel saw a grainy shot of the night sky, filled with unfamiliar constellations. After a moment, this peaceful scene was split by a brilliant light as a huge shooting star ripped out of the sky and smashed into the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust which rushed towards the camera in the last moments before the picture broke into static.

" _This impact, in an unpopulated area, shrouded the world in a dust cloud that stained the sky red; a religious fervour gripped the world. The cult of Sokar experienced a resurgence, but rival cults of Ra and Apophis also emerged. We knew that this must herald some great disaster, but we did not know that the comet and its cargo were the harbingers of a more terrible god than any we had known._ "

A new figure appeared in the hologram, a powerful, dark-skinned man in ornate, black armour. Daniel choked on his salad. "Well, that puts you in a whole new light, Mariana," he noted.

 

In another part of the castle, a little girl lay sleeping. Her baby sister stirred in her crib as a dark shape moved towards her. Mariana Veidt stood over the infant and looked down. Lisl gave a soft, gurgling cry.

 

 " _This was the coming of the Destroyer; of Ahriman. Angel of Chaos, Slayer of Worlds and Slaughterer of the Innocent._ "

 

 "Shh," Mariana murmured, softly, and she reached down into the crib.

*

Amy stood in the shadow of the trees and looked up at the looming bulk of Castle Falkenstein. She raised her hand and pointed to one of the windows. "I went in through there last time," she said. "They tracked me out with dogs, so they'll have secured that window by now. Besides; I doubt you could pass for a maid even if we stopped off in Pfronten for disguises."

"Indeed," Teal'c agreed.

"We should have brought your sneaky friend, but then I suppose she would stand out a little too much as well, with all that scarring on her face."

Teal'c studied the castle in minute detail. "Is it not unusual for there to be so much activity at night?"

"I'm rather afraid it isn't," Amy replied. "Do you think you can get to the ruins of the old outer bailey without being seen?"

"Can you?" Teal'c asked coolly.

"Sorry," Amy said. "Didn't mean to wound your professional pride. You go first then; I'll keep you covered."

Teal'c simply nodded in acknowledgement and then took off for the broken wall, moving fast but low to the ground.

"He is good," Amy allowed.

The Jaffa dropped down behind the wall. After a moment he gestured for Amy to follow him and she ran to his side, as silent as a cat.

"You are well trained for this work," Teal'c noted.

"Better than the one you know, you mean?" Amy asked.

"Indeed."

Amy grinned at him. "If we follow this wall to the edge of the ridge we can hop through a breach and be in cover with a good view of the gatehouse," she explained. "Let's see what all this ruckus is about."

They moved together now, the Jaffa and the assassin, sliding unseen through the night. Both wore dark clothes, although Teal'c was dressed in a countryman's workwear and Amy in the light-absorbing night camouflage of the Executive Action operative, complete with helmet. To further reduce the risk of discovery, each of them wore a standard-issue ioniser at their belt, to prevent detection by dogs.

From the cover of the wall, they looked out over the gatehouse and saw a row of trucks drawn up before an open gate. Men hurried to and fro, loading the vehicles, shouting and guiding them through a complex series of manoeuvres in an attempt to keep the road as clear as possible.

"What are they doing?" Amy asked.

"They are leaving," Teal'c replied.

*

In the small hut, the rest of the group had endeavoured to make an equitable division of the sleeping space. Tom had volunteered to take the first watch, leaving the second bedroom free for Sam and Lotte to share, while Jack had the main bedroom. Inge seemed prepared to sit up with Tom and would not hear of letting Jack give her the use of his bed.

"You can't trust her, Colonel," Sam had warned, but Jack had shaken his head.

"I've been with her a year, Carter," he reminded her. "You may not realise it, but you had an effect on her; after she met you, she was just waiting for a push to get her going. She got that push after the SS tried to kill her. We can trust her, Carter, and we need her."

"Alright," Sam had sighed.

"You just don't like her because she's smarter than you are," Jack had quipped.

Sam had protested, but her heart had not been in it. In part at least, Jack was speaking the truth.

 

Jack settled down to sleep more easily than he had done in a year. He knew now where his friends were, he knew where the all-important Casket was and, for the first time, he believed he had a real chance of getting home. Only one thing was missing and he clutched a pillow against himself as he closed his eyes and sought for slumber.

The creak of the door, when it came, was not unexpected.

"Inge," Jack began, as she slipped beneath the blanket at his side. "I'm not sure..."

"I am," she replied, firmly. "You have spent a year telling me not to let anyone else dictate what I think and do," she reminded him. "That means I am not prepared to give you up, Jack. I will act the quiet girl in public if you are ashamed to let your old friends see us together..."

Jack's heart sank; he felt wretched. "No," he told her, turning over to face her. "I'm not ashamed of you," he lied.

"You did not want them to see me come in here with you," she pointed out.

Jack couldn't think of an answer to that, so instead he kissed her.

"Do you want to sleep?" she asked, wriggling closer to him.

"Not yet," Jack admitted.

*

_2001_

Dr Svetlana Markova sat on board the Special Directorate transport plane and sipped her coffee. The Dassault Falcon 50 was much better than anything that she had ever had access to on the Stargate Project, but then the Directorate had picked up most of the Stargate Project's funding when it collapsed.

"So where exactly are we going?" Djerovich asked.

"We fly out to an airfield in Siberia," Svetlana explained. "There, we meet up with one of the Directorate's less formal contacts, a border guard named Major Rasputina. She was helping our operative before he went missing and she can lead us to the...well, he was able to locate a rather interesting factory." She passed a dossier to the veteran agent and let him read. Djerovich passed it to his junior partner.

"Milk pasteurisation?" Karpova asked sceptically.

"This factory receives regular shipments of botanical samples," Svetlana explained. "And twenty pints of milk per day; already pasteurised and semi-skimmed. Whatever it says on the planning documents, this factory is not pasteurising milk."

"You are sure that this contact will not alert anyone else?" Djerovich asked. "General Pavlov has quite a grip on the military."

Svetlana shook her head. "The Major had two daughters; twins. One of them died as a result of Pavlov's politicking and the other still suffers from post-traumatic stress," she explained. "She will take us to the factory and her husband has provided us with the use of an airstrip that even General Pavlov has no knowledge of."

"And her husband is...?" Karpov asked.

"An...import/export entrepreneur," Svetlana replied.

"A criminal?" Djerovich demanded, enraged.

" _Former_ criminal," Svetlana assured him. "His wife is a very honest border guard and he has served his time in prison. Just don't ask him too many questions about his friends," she suggested.

*

_1944_

A dozen or more parachutes drifted slowly out of the night sky and settled on the edge of the forest. With swift, efficient movements, the commandos gathered their canopies and hurried into the cover of the forest to unlimber their equipment. Major O'Neill signalled for his team to spread out and secure the area, while he conferred with his fellow specialists.

"What do you think?" Duncan asked.

Mathias shrugged. "I'm mostly thinking castle," he admitted.

Sally nodded her agreement. "Look at that place," she said. "It's lit up like a Christmas tree."

"Agreed," Duncan said. "Alright, then; Jackson, go with some of the boys and take a look at the town. Sally and I will see what all the fuss is about. We'll meet up on the ridge overlooking the road, just at the end of that wall."

"If you circle around the hill, you can use the old ruins as cover for your approach," Mathias suggested.

Duncan pondered for a moment and then said. "I'm thinking quick as we can," he admitted. "I got a bad feeling that time is of the essence here."

*

Daniel sat, almost transfixed, and watched the story of the Tserani people. They had been an advanced and cultured people, with a rich civilisation and a dozen great nation states spread across two large continents on their homeworld when Sokar came. They had repelled his initial punitive assault, but knew that he would come again to avenge the humiliation of their rebellion.

" _Ahriman came to our city in the wake of the comet, claiming that he would lead our people out of fear and into the future. He appeared as though he came from the provinces, healing the sick and lame and offering great wisdom and advancement. He brought with him a large following from the countryside, including a dozen close disciples and his loyal right hand, the one called Iblis._ "

The recording sphere displayed a series of images: Ahriman speaking to a civic council, then to a robed man who appeared to be some manner of king; Ahriman addressing a crowd who would not have looked out of place at the Nuremburg Rallies; Ahriman healing the sick.

" _His followers included the rich and famous as well as the poor and disenfranchised and Ahriman soon persuaded King Dar to allow him to act as an ambassador of peace among the nations and sects of our world. He travelled widely and his agent, Iblis passed unseen among us._

" _At first, all seemed well; Ahriman brought all nations to the negotiating table and provided weapons to fight off invaders. We did not realise that he worked in secret against us. Even as we hailed him as a hero and turned a blind eye to the debauches of his followers, he fostered mistrust between our leaders. We were blind to this, until the tragedy at Nagar_."

The scene changed again, showing a great mass of human beings pressing around a great, columned rotunda.

" _He gathered all of the great leaders of our world to a peace conference and feast and his followers spread the word that_ all _who came would be fed. Millions flocked to the hall that he had built on the island of Nagar. There they waited for the announcement that our world would have peace everlasting and for the feast to begin. But time went by and no announcement came._ "

On the display, Daniel saw the people growing restive. Here and there, fights broke out and those closest to the rotunda were shouting abuse.

" _Some tried to leave, but found that their path was blocked by an invisible wall. Panic began to spread from the outer edge of the crowd._ "

The sphere showed that panic, the people pressing away from the force field and jostling those behind them. More fights began, but Daniel could almost see the mood turning as the word spread back through the crowd and all eyes eventually turned towards the rotunda.

" _The people felt betrayed. They turned on their leaders and rushed the great hall_."

The crowd surged forward at the gate and burst into the rotunda, forcing the doors with the sheer weight of their presence and leaving dozens crushed in the press. The images swirled and now Daniel saw the crowd charging along the corridor, smashing anything breakable that came to hand and snatching up chairs and pedestals to use as weapons. At the door to the council chamber they paused, until once again the pressure of so many bodies burst the doors asunder and the front rank spilled across the floor in a mangled heap.

The crowd rushed down to the great round table and stopped in horror. There in front of them they beheld an obscene abomination. The rulers of the proud nations of their world lay before them, not merely slain, but their bodies arrayed in poses of the foulest degradation with each other and with the carcasses of men, women, boys, girls and animals. The king from that earlier scene still moved; he was as dead as the others, but his corpse had been strapped to the back of a pig that wandered aimlessly about the hall, stopping here and there to feed on the dead.  The bodies of dozens of children were hung about the walls like paper dolls.

And in the centre of the round table, Ahriman stood over the stone bulk of the Dahak Casket. His face was covered by the visage of a leering demon, but Daniel knew him by the black armour he had seen earlier. He was soaked in blood. The body of a young girl, torn and disembowelled, but with her angelic face quite free from hurt or gore, lay atop the Casket.

" _Welcome!_ " Ahriman boomed, and it was the voice that had threatened the narrator at the beginning of the recording. " _Behold your future, Tserani. Behold the fate of those who defy Lord Sokar._ "

" _It was a scene calculated to create fury and it succeeded. Unable to take in the scope of the slaughter before them, many people missed the details and swore that some leaders were absent from the scene. They turned on each other, every nation certain that they had been betrayed. And Ahriman laughed._ "

And Ahriman did just that. And then he lowered his hands and thrust the dead child from the Casket. He slid his hands across the bloody surface in a precise pattern and the Casket cracked open. The inner seals parted and a vile, unnatural, black radiance poured forth, casting its shadows across the room. Disputes became violent and the crowd began to tear and bite at one another.

Ahriman stepped backwards, flung his arms into the air and laughed out loud. Transport rings sprang from the table and the Goa'uld was swept away in a flash of light. The shot cut back to the outside of the rotunda and the heaving, battling mass of humanity that tore and rent at each other.

And then the rotunda exploded and a wall of black light washed out.

" _The wave of destruction travelled around the world_ ," the narrator explained. " _Every soul on Nagar was killed by the blast; they were the lucky ones. A rage struck the Tserani and they turned on one another. Armies fired on civilians, missiles were launched, striking friends, neighbours or even the countries who launched them as their controllers succumbed. Families slew one another, children murdering parents and parents slaughtering their children. Even the animals went mad, tearing at anything that came close to them._

" _Rivers ran red with blood and the earth was stained. Even the seas foamed crimson as the whales and the sharks and the fishes tore one another to shreds. Our good, green world turned red._ "

Daniel did not regret that there were no pictures of this horror. Instead, the recording cut back to the narrator's battered face.

" _And then it stopped. At last, the madness left us and the survivors began, slowly, to emerge from hiding. Small groups came together; camps arose and the long business of rebuilding began. That was when Ahriman returned._

_"He came with Iblis and they struck each camp where the survivors had tried to bring life out of all this death. There was no hiding from them and they rooted out every survivor. Some they killed out of hand; others were presented before the Casket and forced to fight and kill one another. None were spared, not men nor women, nor even children. Babes were snatched from their mothers' arms and smashed on the pavement, until barely an acre of land remained on this world that was not stained with blood._

_"Now, at last, I am the only one left and death will be a sweet release to me._ "

There was a dark, cruel laugh and the blade was taken away from the man's throat. " _If you seek death_ ," Ahriman growled, " _you must find your own_."

And now the image showed the world from space once more and it _was_ red.

Daniel felt the bile rise in his throat at the horror and the absurdity and the obscene _waste_ of such a dreadful action. His blood ran cold as he thought of Magda and Lisl and that haunting line: _not men nor women, nor even children_.

 

Magda woke slowly and saw the shadowy form standing over Lisl's crib. As the last fog of sleep left her, she saw Mariana turn towards her with Lisl in her arms.

And Mariana bounced the infant gently and cooed and whispered to her.

"You and your sister are very special," Mariana murmured. "You will _live_ , whatever happens to the rest of your world. You will live and you will serve me well, and if needs be it shall be your task and your honour to repopulate this benighted world when I am done with it."

Magda watched and she listened, although many of the words meant nothing to her, even those that she knew the sound of. She sat up a little more and Mariana looked up at her.

"Good evening, Magda," Mariana said. "You have slept a long time."

"Good evening, Mariana," Magda replied.

"Come here and take your sister," Mariana instructed. "I am afraid that we will need to leave this place now. Clothes have been brought and packed for you; you need only dress yourself, put on a coat and make sure that Lisl is wrapped up snug and warm."

"Yes, Mariana," Magda agreed, looking at her with absolute love and trust, for this was the woman who had dressed her warmly, restored her hearing and sung to her the first song that she had ever heard.

Mariana handed Lisl to Magda and turned to go, but Magda caught her by the hand.

"Yes, Magda?"

"I love you, Mariana," the little girl declared.

Mariana blinked, momentarily speechless. Ahriman was unused to declarations of love; fear was her idiom. It had no more been a common occurrence for Mariana Veidt herself to hear such words, at least not from any but her devoted and willing slaves, who had all been adult males. Women had always disliked her and she had had little time for children. "I...Well, I love you too, Magda," she said slowly, knowing that this was what was expected.

Magda beamed with joy.

Leaving the girl to get ready, Mariana went out into the corridor. Iblis, still trapped in the injured form of Frau Zelig, was waiting for her; weak from blood loss, the shapeshifter leaned heavily against the wall.

Mariana laughed out loud. "Do you know? It may just be true."

"Imperiatrix?"

"Never mind," Mariana said. "Bring Daniel to the car."

"Daniel?" Iblis knew that it was foolish to bait her mistress this way, but she had always been able to slip between bodies and avoid physical pain. Being forced to endure the effects of Anile Zelig's injuries was making her ill-tempered. "Do you use the given names of all of your prisoners now? Or is it only this one that you consider your equal?"

"Mind your tongue if you ever want to leave that battered form!" Mariana snapped. "Get out of my sight, before I add to your troubles. No, wait," she added, as Zelig began to shamble awkwardly away. "Come with me first. I shall heal the worst of your injuries."

Zelig inclined her head. "Thank you, Imperiatrix," she whispered, gratefully. Her eyes sparkled with tears at this unexpected act of kindness.

"Do not think that I do so for your comfort," Mariana assured her with a sneer. "I merely wish to be sure that you do not bleed in the car and frighten the children."

*

Sam found that, despite her long trek to reach Castle Falkenstein, it was hard for her to sleep. Lotte – a woman long-used to sleeping under the pall of fear and nervous excitation – had no sooner lain down than she had curled in on herself and fallen asleep. Sam, however, was too agitated by the reunion with her CO, the impending return of the fourth member of their group and the possibility of a return to their own time to find repose.

Either that or she could not sleep because Lotte was hogging all of the covers.

With a sigh, Sam swung her legs to the floor and pulled on her boots.

"Something wrong?" Lotte asked.

Sam looked around and saw the girl's almost-black eyes sparkling in the darkness. "Just restless," Sam assured her. "Go back to sleep."

Lotte closed her eyes and did just that; Sam envied her.

Sam struggled into her vest, pulled her civilian coat on over it and picked up her MP40; she had abandoned her P90 a year ago, its ammunition exhausted, smashing it to pieces so that no-one could find and replicate its technology. She pulled back her hair and fixed it in a short ponytail. She was looking forward to having it cut short again once she got home; if short hair were not so out of place in this time, she would have had it trimmed already.

The main room was empty. Sam poured herself a cup of coffee and went outside to join Tom Keeler on guard.

"Good morning, Major," Tom greeted her, without turning.

"Commandant-Lieutenant," she replied.

"Call me Tom, Major, please," he said. "Exec operatives work primarily undercover. I haven't worn my uniform since my last promotion ceremony and I rarely use my rank."

"Alright, Tom," she agreed, but as her understanding was that a commandant-lieutenant was roughly analogous to a senior lieutenant in the Air Force, she did not invite him to call her Sam. She looked over at him and saw a looked of pensive worry on his face. "What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I was thinking about my Master-at-Arms," he admitted. "He said I was the best he'd ever trained; he'd have kicked my ass if he'd lived to see me let an untrained peasant with a shiv get the drop on his kid sister."

"You were trained by Major Kawalsky?"

"Captain," Tom corrected, "although it's probably about the same thing. I've always known the Kawalskys a little," he explained. "Our families had a connection. We always did alright in the Empire, because we were there when the Imperiatrix came back from the Antarctic; like your family."

"Huh?" Sam asked.

"It was Sally Carter, Duncan O'Neill, Mathias Jackson, Stephan and Mia Kawalsky and my grandparents, Albert and Rachael Kreel, who brought Mariana Veidt to the United States," Tom explained. The, ah, ‘big three' – Carter, O'Neill and Jackson – became her inner circle, while the Kawalskys and the Keelers – as they became known in the States – were left with only each other. They all died in suspicious circumstances," he added, in response to Sam's shocked silence. "First O'Neill, then Carter; Mathias Jackson lasted longest, but after his wife was killed..."

"Good God," Sam gasped.

"The M-at-A was a conspiracy theorist," Tom explained. "Not quite a rebel, but a doubter. He believed that the three of them had been murdered because they began to question Veidt's motives. Jacob Carter and Marius Jackson..."

"Marius?"

"Named after Veidt," Tom said. "I'd bet real money that was a cause of some friction in the marriage. But those two were raised almost from infancy by the Lady President's closest servants, while O'Neill's family were almost wiped out, leaving only baby Jack to be raised by the state."

"And no-one said anything?"

"She won the war for us," Tom replied. "No-one much wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth and by the time anyone thought to question..." He sighed. "I don't know what kind of aliens you are used to dealing with are like, but Veidt – Ahriman – is exceptionally good at what she does. She found that serpent, Iblis, not long before the fall of the Reich and with his aid she extended her power throughout the Capitol. She gained position after position, from Presidential Advisor to Chief of Special Projects; she seemed surprised when they passed the Amendment and proposed her as Presidential candidate, but I suppose that Iblis arranged that."

"Why did no-one fight back?" Sam demanded.

"Because it _worked_ ," Tom replied. "Most people never saw the bloodshed and in its wake she brought _peace_ ; prosperity. Life in the Empire was _good_. It's hard to see the evil when you are not suffering."

"And...Amy?"

"We knew each other as children, a very little, but I never thought much of her, nor she of me. I don't think she recognised me when we met as adults; I certainly didn't know her. I'd last seen her in dungarees and there she was wearing about a square foot of blood-red leather."

Sam choked on her coffee. "I _beg_ your pardon."

"She was possessed by Iblis," he explained. "Iblis had a funny taste in party clothes," he added, without the slightest hint of humour. It was clear that, for this man, the memory of his lover dressed in skimpy leathers was not a happy one. "Go ahead," he said, apropos of nothing.

"Tom?"

"Confirmed," he said. "Hold; bringing in Gulveig." He turned to face Sam. "Word from the castle," he explained. He took an earwig from his pocket and handed it to Sam.

Sam took the device and put it in her ear.

"Go ahead," Tom said again.

" _It looks as though target is moving house,_ " Amy Kawalsky reported. " _Gultop asks if Úlfhednar can join him in the mall to assist him in a little shopping expedition_."

"Confirmed," Tom agreed.

" _Match the listener to my song_ ," Amy added.

" _Kriemhild, no_ ," Tom argued.

"Tom?" Sam asked.

Tom touched his ear. "Siegfried," he insisted. "With the channel open, everything you say is on air."

Sam blushed, furiously. "Sorry."

Tom took his hand from his ear. "Kriemhild, it's too risky."

" _We can't lose them_ ," Amy insisted. " _You bring Grimtep and Gulveig after me. If it has to be, that's an order, Siegfried_."

"Yes, Ma'am," Tom sighed.

" _Out_."

Tom clenched his fist in frustration. Sam mused that this was just one reason why the Air Force had fraternisation regulations in the first place.

"So what was all that about, in real terms?" she asked.

"Your friend Teal'c wants you to send the Phantom up to the ruins to help him acquire transportation and supplies," Tom explained. "Amy will stay with the enemy convoy and I'm to use our resonance detector to trace her temporal signature and bring you after her."

Sam nodded her understanding. "I'll fetch Lotte," she said. "Then we'll get the others up and ready to move. Except...is Dr Weiss up already? I didn't see her in the main room."

Tom laughed. "Well, she wouldn't be," he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Tom's smile faded. "You mean you didn't realise?"

"Realise _what_?"

*

Daniel was expecting Mariana, or perhaps the maid, Marta, when the door opened, but it was Frau Zelig who opened the door.

"Reports of your injury seem to have been rather greatly exaggerated," Daniel commented.

"You did that," Zelig said, accusingly. "You, a human, were able to turn the force of my beloved Dahak against me!"

"I had help," Daniel assured her.

"Get dressed!" Zelig spat. "We're leaving. The garrison is loading the Casket for transportation for our secondary facility. You and the _children_ will accompany us."

"Magda and Lisl?" Daniel asked. "Are they safe?"

"Safe!" Zelig's eyes flared white. "Safe as can be. _She_ says that she _loves_ them." Zelig turned her head and spat onto the floor. "For the last two days, every moment out of the laboratory she has been tumbling with you or sitting with those children, cuddling and cosseting them; rocking the infant to sleep, or stroking the older one's hair and calling her sweet names," she sneered.

Daniel began to change into travelling clothes from the wardrobe, refusing to let himself be discomfited by Zelig's presence.

"You I almost understand," she admitted. "You are quite exquisitely formed for a mortal and the desire to take pleasure from our human meat is one that I know only too well. But the children? How can they hold any interest for her?"

With one leg in and one out of a pair of pants, Daniel paused. "You're jealous of them," he realised.

"Shut up and dress," she snarled.

Over the years, Daniel had learned to curb his natural outspokenness to a degree. One-too-many beatings had cured him of the impulse to always speak his mind, but he could not help his thoughts. As he finished dressing, he turned and watched Zelig, who half turned away and tried to pretend that he held not the slightest interest for her.

"Do not look at me like that!" she demanded, suddenly. "I do not want your pity!"

With a shock, Daniel realised that, whether she wanted it or not, Frau Zelig – or rather, Iblis – had his pity. He had never known a Goa'uld who exuded such an air of raw need; had never seen one of his world's parasitic foes so eaten up by envy and insecurity. He would rarely have characterised the Goa'uld as psychologically stable, but Iblis was a whole different story.

"It's the shapeshifting, isn't it?" he asked.

"Be silent."

"No-one knows what you look like, so no-one worships you. No-one trusts you," he added, thinking of the Ashrak, Mafdet.

"I do not want trust," she assured him.

"What do you want?" Daniel asked. "To be acknowledged by your master? For someone to hold you like she holds Magda? To be loved for no reason but yourself?"

"Shut up! Shut up!" she screamed. "If My Lord Ahriman did not want you unharmed...!"

"But she does, doesn't she," Daniel reminded her. "But she's a little less concerned about you."

"Shut. Up."

Daniel pulled on his shirt and gave her a long, hard look.

"Don't look at me," Zelig growled.

"You realise that you might get more snuggles if you could be a little less defensive," he suggested.

Zelig frowned and turned away from him.

Daniel donned a sweater and a jacket, trying to ignore the gnawing impulse that was building inside him. At last, however, it became too much for him. He picked up a coat and crossed to stand beside Zelig and then laid a hand on her shoulder.

Zelig turned towards him. The white flame burned through the tears in her eyes and for a moment that light looked more plaintive than intimidating. Her hand rose and reached towards him, but then her face contorted in rage and she thrust him violently away from her.

"I need nothing from you!" she insisted. "There is a bag of spare clothes for you in the corridor. _You_ can carry it. _I_ have a bullet wound."

*

"There they are," Teal'c whispered.

Amy nodded, watching the four figures moving towards the shining, black bulk of a staff car; three adults and a child, the latter carrying a baby in her arms. "They must be about to leave," she said. "I'll get down to the trucks; you wait for the Phantom of the Opera."

As she rose and prepared to make her way down the ridge, Teal'c caught her arm.

"Her name is Lotte," he said, softly.

Amy opened her mouth and then closed it again, feeling the weight of meaning behind his rebuke. "I'm sorry," she said.

Teal'c nodded his acceptance of the apology. "And she is not a phantom," he added. "She is a Ghost."

 

Jack woke suddenly with a light shining into his face. Instinctively, he reached for his P90, but then the light was lowered and he recognised the silhouette in the doorway.

"Carter?" he asked, confused.

"They're on the move," Sam replied. "Teal'c and Lotte are getting us some wheels, but we need to be ready."

Jack nodded. "Two minutes," he promised.

"And her?" Sam asked, flicking the flashlight beam over to Inge for a moment.

"Two minutes, Major," Jack repeated coolly.

"Yes, Sir," she replied.

 

Three trucks stood in the goods yard of the castle, waiting for the last of the supplies to be loaded. At last, the signal was given and the pulled away, one after the other towards the gate. The second truck was obviously in trouble, however and it wobbled terribly as the driver struggled with the wheel. After a moment he stopped, switched off the engine and leaned on the horn to get the attention of the Feldwebel in the front truck.

"What is wrong?" the Feldwebel demanded.

"Flat tire," the driver replied. "We'll need to change it."

The Feldwebel snorted in disgust. "You should have checked earlier," he said. "We can't wait for you; just get it sorted out and follow on as best you can."

"Yes, Feldwebel," the driver acknowledged.

As the other two trucks pulled away, the driver and his mate jumped down and fetched out the huge, pneumatic jack that was needed to lift the three-tonner. More than half of the garrison had been roused and ferried out by truck and there were no mechanics left in the yard to do this work for them. They could probably have found some more, but they had no time to waste. They cranked up the truck and changed the wheel, then lowered the truck back to the ground.

"Look at this!" the driver called, as his mate stowed the jack. "Bring a flashlight."

The other man came over and they examined the deflated wheel. As the driver had suspected, the damage was no simple puncture but a long, clean tear; the cut of a razor-sharp knife.

"We'd better..." he began, but he got no further. A powerful arm wrapped around his neck from behind and twisted. His mate did not even have time to look around before he too was seized, a hand clamped over his mouth and a knife slipped smoothly into his back.

Lotte snatched the keys from the driver's belt and ran to the cab while Teal'c swung the two bodies up into the back of the truck. He sprang up behind them and Lotte drove out of the gates at high speed. Only when they were a mile from the castle did she slow down so that Teal'c could dump the bodies in a ditch and join her in the cab.

Lotte smiled and handed him a map, neatly folded and with their route marked out in red. "And the supplies?" she asked, as she pulled away again.

"Food and clothing," Teal'c replied. "Everything that we require."

 

Duncan O'Neill watched through field glasses as the castle emptied and he gaped in disbelief. As the last truck rumbled out, some way behind the others, Sally Carter struggled up the ridge to join him.

"It looks as though someone was expecting the bailiffs," she noted.

"Or the in-laws," Duncan agreed. As he spoke, the truck pulled to a halt. "Alright, let's go. I want to get hold of that last truck and see if we can..." He stopped as a man climbed from the tailgate and dragged an unwieldy load down from the bed of the truck.

"Is that a body?" Sally asked.

Duncan frowned as a second corpse was unloaded. "I don't think we're alone," he told Sally.

The truck moved off and Duncan watched until it turned away and drove out of sight. "It's not going to the same place as the others," he noted. He turned at the sound of an engine and saw another vehicle approaching, this one coming up from the town of Ingen. "We need transportation," he said. "We bag this one."

"What about the driver?" Sally asked.

"Just...stay here," Duncan told her.

Sally sighed, but if there was to be any assassination – or even non-fatal mugging – of civilians, she had no real wish to be involved. She stayed put as Duncan slithered down the hillside to crouch in ambush below the rendezvous point. The car came closer and Sally noticed that it was showing no lights. It slowed as it approached, eventually rolling to a stop just a few feet from Duncan's position.

A window rolled down.

"Need a lift?" Mathias called.

"Jackson!" Duncan hissed, angrily. "What are you doing in that car?"

"Driving," the archaeologist replied. "I saw they were pulling out and thought we might want to follow. Sorry I couldn't get anything to fit the boys."

"I'll send them back to the extraction point," Duncan sighed. "Shame; it would have been nice to have back up on this one, but even if you got a bus, we couldn't easily trek across Germany with an entire squad of commandos."

Sally scrambled down the hill to the roadside. "Mercedes-Benz, 170V Cabriolet A," she said, approvingly. "Gotta hand it to the Germans; they make a mess of the world, but they make great cars. Aren't you worried that the owner will miss it?"

It was hard to see his face in the starlight, but Sally knew that Mathias's smile had just vanished.

"Mathias?" she asked.

"No-one in that town is going to miss anything," Mathias said, sombrely. "They're all dead."

"God," Duncan gasped.

Sally looked at the Major. She knew that he could be a hard man when he had to be, but he was an old soldier and knew that there were things that soldiers could not easily accept. It was one thing to attack, even kill, a civilian and steal his vehicle, but slaughtering the population of a town was quite another.

"It's worse than that, though," Mathias said.

"Tell us on the way," Duncan told him. "We need to get moving."

*

_Siberia  
2001_

 

Major Valerie Pavlovna Rasputina was a tall, handsome woman with a stern bearing. She had the look of a career officer and carried a Dragunov SVD with an easy familiarity. A small squad of border guards stood close by; unlike their leader, several of them were clearly local, with tanned skin and Mongol features. They wore uniform fatigue jackets under heavy hide coats and two of the four had replaced their regulation footwear with fur-lined riding boots.

"Major Rasputina," Svetlana greeted the officer.

"Dr Markova," Rasputina replied.

Svetlana quickly made the introductions and Rasputina led them across the airfield to a bulky, grey-hulled vehicle with a sharply-slanting prow. "I am afraid there will be little home comfort," she apologised. "There is bad business afoot at this factory."

"So you thought a tank was the order of the day," Karpova drawled.

"We must deal with all sorts in the border patrol," Rasputina replied. "But this is not a tank, she is an armoured transport; a BTR-70, to be precise. A little antiquated, perhaps, but we do not always have access to the high-end technology out here in the hinterland." She patted the vehicle's hull fondly. "We call her Borte, after the wife of Genghis Khan," she added.

"How sweet," Karpova noted, as the four of them crowded into the rear compartment of the BTR, along with three of the soldiers. "You can almost smell the yurts."

Rasputina glanced at Karpova as she stowed her rifle. "Be careful what you say," she cautioned, with what might or might not have been a smile. "You sit among the descendents of a proud race and they do not take insults to their ancestors lightly. It is all too easy to disappear in Siberia."

Karpova shivered.

"Is that why you operate out of a smuggler's airfield?" Djerovich asked blandly.

"The rules are a little bit different out here," Rasputina went on. "There are precious few respectable livings to be made on the tundra, but on the other hand, the criminals tend to be, for want of a better word, honest. We don't have enough people to control a border as big as this, so we have to compromise; it wouldn't take much for a high-handed city cop to make things very tough for the border patrol." She sighed. "But we are not here to argue, but because there is something that we agree on. We may turn a blind eye to a little horse-theft and racketeering, but we're hard on gun-runners and drugs. I think we can agree on that," she offered.

"Yes, we can," Djerovich agreed.

"Well, whoever is operating from the old bunker, they are serious customers. They have influence and money; armed guards and high-end security. That says drugs to me, and a lot more than a little marijuana."

"Bunker?" Karpova asked. "I thought this was a factory?"

"It has been a lot of things," Rasputina explained. "It was built during the war to house some kind of secret project. It was used as the housing for a secret laboratory and an experimental power station since."

Karpova raised an eyebrow. "And now a milk pasteurisation plant?"

"And such a lucrative venture that it is protected by guards with expensive Belgian assault rifles," Rasputina added. "Captain Byko of the Special Directorate was a cautious man, yet not cautious enough. I did not bring this squad along simply for the quality of their transportation."

At that moment, with the fourth patrolman safely installed in the machine gunner's seat, the driver switched on the engine and the entire vehicle began to shudder.

"I'm not entirely sure that the Empress would have been flattered by the comparison," Karpova noted, her voice distorted by the bone shaking rattle of the BTR.

"By all accounts, the lovely Borte was pretty hard to handle herself," Rasputina assured her.

"Do you have a plan?" Svetlana asked.

"Plan is a strong term for what we have," Rasputina replied. "I have managed to make contact with one of the workers at the plant. He has confirmed that the entire workforce is devoted to processing the snow lily into a thick, greenish-white paste that is compressed and dried into tablets."

"Dragon," Djerovich growled.

"Can you trust this man?" Karpova asked.

Rasputina was silent.

"Major?" Svetlana asked.

"My husband seems to think so," she allowed. "He assured me that I can trust the man absolutely."

"You sound doubtful," Svetlana noted.

"I have great faith in my husband's judgement," Rasputina asserted. "He would not have survived among very long among smugglers if her trusted ill-advisedly."

"I thought that you were tough on smugglers?" Karpova noted.

"Yes, but he is an _ex_ -smuggler," she assured the agents. "He let himself be led astray once, by the lure of guns and drugs, but he went straight after a jail term and our marriage. By local standards, that means that he restricts himself to horse-theft and race fixing," she admitted with a wry smile. "In spite of that one lapse of good sense, I trust him and his judgement," she repeated. "It is only that...well; he has never met my contact. In fact, when he told me that I could trust the man, I had not even mentioned meeting him."

*

_1944 – A fortnight later  
Siberia_

The troops who escorted the convoy of trucks to the gates of the newly-constructed bunker wore Russian uniforms, but they were well-armed with a mixture of MP40 submachine guns and Mauser K98k rifles. There were even a few of the new StG44 assault rifles in evidence, which could have betrayed the troops as soldiers of the Wehrmacht, even with all traces of Nazi iconography stripped from the sides of the trucks. Not that many units of the poorly-equipped Red Army would have stood a chance of stopping this force reaching its destination.

"It's a little more Spartan than Falkenstein," Daniel noted as he climbed out of the car. "I like the obelisks," he added.

Zelig, now almost healed, stood close behind him, her malice almost palpable. As though sensing and rejecting his ongoing sympathy for her plight, Iblis had made a point of being as vile towards Daniel as possible and Mariana, not unwilling to see Daniel ground down, but apparently wishing to retain her place in Magda's good graces, had allowed this to a point.

In terms of good graces, Daniel's place in Magda's was secure, but he had lost some of Mariana's favour by vacating her bed. After the little home movie that she had laid on for him, the thought of touching Ahriman's host made him physically nauseous. Perhaps her face had not been in the record, but the knowledge that the mind was the same – and that that ruthless will had power over the lives of Magda and Lisl – was more than he could stand, for any reason. He had always known that he had a limited reserve of hypocrisy and now he felt sure that he had plumbed its depths.

"It is not without its comforts," Mariana assured him. "Let us get Magda and Lisl settled into their quarters and you shall see that my dear ones will not be required to sleep on stone. Afterwards, I shall show you the more functional part of the compound."

Daniel noted with some interest that the bunker was manned by Russian soldiers and that they mixed poorly with the German newcomers. It did not escape Daniel's notice either that Mariana had begun to speak Russian – with a flawless accent – since their arrival and that the Russians addressed her as Comrade Dr Mariya Witte. She had swiftly dispatched the Germans to guard the perimeter of the compound, thus separating the two forces.

The quarters were located three storeys below ground, but they were very richly-appointed. They seemed very open and airy, for all that they had no windows. Daniel recognised the artificial light that the Goa'uld used in their starships, or at least an approximation thereof. Magda, her juvenile mind having already left her true family and their tragic fate in the past, was clearly thrilled. The fact that the room was equipped with a fine crib told Daniel that Mariana had been in contact with the garrison here since their meeting.

Leaving the delighted Magda to settle Lisl in their chambers and dismissing Zelig to see to the domestic arrangements, Mariana took a fast hold on Daniel's arm – far from oblivious to his revulsion – and steered him back through the artificial caverns of the bunker towards what Daniel thought must be the centre of the complex.

"This is where I have constructed what I now feel to be my rather unsatisfactory substitute to you, my dear Daniel," she explained. "I have made a resonating chamber for the Dahak energies, which I hope will obviate the need for such a sacrifice as you beheld in the record of the Tserani."

"Do you always force your victims to record their own destruction?" Daniel asked, cringing away as far as he could manage.

"Not always," she replied, "but work such as mine serves no purpose if not recorded. Such excesses have a salutary function, if word of them is disseminated, and prevent others from taking the foolish step of defying Lord Sokar."

"You sound almost sorry," Daniel noted.

Mariana shrugged. "I have always enjoyed my work," she admitted, "although in my later years I find myself longing for survivors to rule over."

"Why..." Daniel swallowed hard. "Why did you do that to their leaders?" he asked. "What purpose did it serve?"

Mariana smiled. "Rage," she replied. "Before it can destroy a world, Dahak must feed and its food is anger; its drink, hatred. As I say, however, I believe that this resonating chamber will allow me to unleash that power without the need for such...absurd and, yes, perhaps obscene theatrics."

"‘Perhaps' obscene?" Daniel asked. Familiarity had bred contempt and he now found it difficult to be surprised by the excesses of the Goa'uld, but their attitude to their own deeds still sometimes left him aghast. "And what do you plan to do? Wipe out the population of Siberia? Rough on the Siberians, certainly, but hardly a global-level horror."

Mariana ignored his scorn and continued: "Instead of creating an external concentration of rage, I need only seal the open Casket in the chamber. Contained, the energies will resonate, creating a reinforcing wave. By the time that the chamber cracks on impact, the energies contained within will be too awesome for even me to comprehend."

"Cracks on impact?" Daniel was beginning to worry.

With a sinister laugh, Mariana led Daniel through a door into a silo, the size of the Gateroom and six storeys high. They were approximately halfway up the chamber, on a steel walkway which ran around the body of a huge rocket.

"Behold, the Vergeltungwaffe Entsheidende," Mariana declared. "The ultimate weapon of vengeance; a missile the like of which this pathetic world has never known. On launch, it will climb to an altitude of one-hundred-and-thirty miles, and then descend to impact on its target; undetectable and unstoppable, and accurate to within one hundred yards at a range of ten-thousand yards."

"An ICBM?" Daniel asked.

"A what?"

"Intercontinental ballistic missile," Daniel replied. "We'll be building these soon enough...although that is very accurate," he admitted.

"These ICBMs will be based on _my_ designs, no doubt," Mariana growled. "And none of those will carry such a deadly payload. The warhead of the V-En is the resonating chamber for my beloved Dahak. Soon – very soon – this beautiful weapon will carry the Dahak Casket to Britain and transform the Allied forces assembled there into no more than a rampaging mob in the midst of their own stronghold."

She gave a self-satisfied chuckled. "Or at least, that is what I promised Der Führer in order to get the parts for the V-En."

*

Frau Dr Veidt's German force had brought several tonnes of food, as well as dozens of crates of the Reich's most advanced battlefield weapons. Coupled with the groundwater reserves at the bunker, this would permit the two forces and the three hundred assembled civilians – representatives of many nations, all sympathisers to Ahriman's apocalyptic utopian cause, carefully groomed and gathered here by Iblis and her fellow agents – to survive in isolation for over a year. While the Germans reinforced the perimeter, Comrade Dr Witte's Russian platoon unloaded the convoy as quickly as possible; the Siberian winter was bitingly cold and they had to move the supplies to the sheds and get the trucks under cover before the petrol engines froze solid.

Private Grinkov was part of a three man team unloading one of the three-tonne trucks, loaded with blankets and clothing. He reached in and lifted out an armful of blankets and, to his surprise – not to say amazement – found a woman lying underneath, with a strange mask covering her mouth and nose.

"Who are you?" he demanded, then, realising that it did not matter, he dropped the blankets back on top of the woman and called out: "Sergeant!"

There was a soft sound, like a heavy sneeze, and something plucked at the heavy cloth. Grinkov tried to call out again as the woman pushed free of the pile of blankets, but found that he could neither speak not move.

Grinkov's sergeant heard his call and saw the soldier collapse to the ground. He saw the third man in his team run over, then recoil and fall, bleeding, beside Grinkov, becoming one of only two men in this version of history who would ever be killed by a bullet from a Heckler & Colt KSP-9.

The sergeant, more cautious than his subordinates, drew his pistol and moved forward to stand beside the truck. As the woman dropped to the ground, he levelled the muzzle of the revolver at the back of her head. "Halte!" he commanded.

"Damnit," the woman growled, raising her hands.

The sergeant stepped forward, but before he could reach the intruder, he felt a sharp pain in the small of his back and his vision blurred into blackness.

"Sloppy," the killer accused.

"Him or me?" Amy turned to face Gretel. The current host – or perhaps _incarnation_ would be a more appropriate term – of Ormazdh was a strikingly beautiful brunette, whose slender, willowy frame was made deadly by the symbiote coiled around the base of her brain.

"What brings you here?" Amy asked blithely, her voice muffled by her mask.

"Much the same as you," Gretel replied, crouching to retrieve her dagger.

Amy reached up and removed the respirator from her face. The gauge on the side informed her that she had only an hour of air left. "I'm glad we got here when we did. It was hard for me to sneak a breath from under those blankets; a few more miles and they would have been unloading a corpse."

"A frozen corpse," Gretel added, pulling her greatcoat close around her. "Let's get you something warmer from the trucks."

Amy shook her head. "We need to get out and I'm wearing my TCG fatigues under this farmer's tunic; all I need is a hood and I could go for a stroll on the frozen tundra."

"We _are_ on the frozen tundra," Gretel told her, but she did not push the matter. Amy was right that they needed to get away from the bodies and the trucks before another team arrived. They slipped away from the goods yard and into the cover of a stone bulwark.

"Why didn't you come back to the hut?" Amy asked.

"Jaffa," Gretel replied. "I have no idea what a Jaffa is doing here and now, but he would sense the symbiote in me. That's a lot of explanation and I didn't feel up to it." She shrugged out of her coat and passed it to Amy.

"You need that more than I do," Amy assured her.

Gretel shook her head. "I'm going back in," she explained. "You might need to look like you belong outside. The German troops have set up half a mile out; you'll need to pass them to meet up with Tom and the others. I'll be the woman on the inside."

"Alright," Amy agreed, grudgingly, "but watch out for Iblis. She's riding around in a blonde called Zelig."

"Frau Anile Zelig," Gretel agreed. "I saw her when she came hunting us. She used to be one of his mistresses; a General's wife. I wonder what happened to General Zelig. Nothing good I suppose," she mused. "A shame. He wasn't such a bad old thing as SS staff officers go."

"That's a pretty big qualifier," Amy declared. She pulled on the coat, checked the pistol and tucked it into the hidden holster inside her jacket. "Alright; I'm going to get in touch with Tom and the others; what about you?"

"I'll try to find out what Ahriman has in mind," Gretel replied. "I'll try to get word to you and act alone only if I have to. You must do the same; if you do not hear from me, I shall likely have succumbed to death at last and I will rely on you to finish my work for me."

Amy shook her head. "Honestly, Gretel; you're even more of a pessimist than Tom."

*

Teal'c pulled their stolen three-tonne truck to a halt by the roadside almost as soon as Amy's temporal trace stopped moving. The team huddled in the back of the truck, wrapped for warmth in the greatcoats that had been the vehicle's cargo, while Tom – whose TCG fatigues protected him from the cold, as Amy's protected her – scouted out a place to stay.

"She may be a Nazi sociopath," Sam noted, "but you have to admire her gall; relocating in the depths of Soviet territory."

"Ahriman is no Nazi," Teal'c reminded her. "A Goa'uld would feel loyalty to no human leader and she may well have offered her services to the Soviets instead of – or as well as – the Nazis. We must consider the possibility that we shall face resistance from Soviet troops."

Jack gave a dry chuckle. "After the SS, whatever poor Red Army saps haven't been relocated to the front should be a breeze," he assured the Jaffa. "It's the weather I'm worried about."

Suddenly, Jack and Teal'c reached for their weapons, and a moment later they heard a soft whistle. Jack gave a soft, answering whistle and Tom scrambled into the back of the truck.

"There's a bunker a few miles north; that's where Amy is, although she seems to be on radio silence still. A mile east of here, there's an old, abandoned farmhouse. It looks like it would make a pretty good base of operations; certainly better than the back of this truck," he added.

"Agreed," Jack said. "You and Lotte scout the area, make sure there are no patrols about. There are some Red Army coats in the back here, which should help you blend in. We'll take the truck up to the farmhouse and establish headquarters. Once we have somewhere to plan from and fall back to, we'll worry about the bunker."

 

The farmhouse was indeed perfect for their needs. Like the house near to Paderborn where Jack and Inge had hidden from their SS pursuers, it was abandoned, but not derelict. There was a range, which could be refuelled easily enough once they had a chance to chop some wood, and the water supply was pumped up from underground. There was even a barn which they could use to hide the truck; only a rusty old chain kept the doors shut.

As the team unloaded their gear from the truck, Sam opened up a tool kit and retrieved a pair of heavy bolt cutters. "Here," she said, slapping the cutters into Weiss' hand. "Get the chain off the barn doors and try to open it up."

"Yes, Major Carter," Weiss replied, with equanimity, although she was wringing her hand in pain.

Sam scowled at the scientist's retreating back.

"Go a little easy on her, would you," Jack said.

Sam turned her scowl on her CO for a moment, then quickly schooled her expression into neutrality.

Jack sighed. "Go on," he said.

"Sir?"

"Permission to speak freely, Carter. Say what's on your mind."

Sam paused for a moment, then exclaimed: "How could you do it, Colonel?"

"Do wh...No, I'm not walking into that one," Jack said. "Things happen, Carter. Inge and I have been together for a whole year and...I'm only human," he sighed.

"She's weak!" Sam snapped. "She's a pitiful, needy creature and you're taking advantage of her!"

"Inge isn't the meek little mouse that she was when you met her," Jack replied, sternly. "She's been through the fire and come out stronger. She can keep going longer than me, for crying out loud."

Sam raised an eyebrow.

"I don't mean..." Jack sighed again. "Sometimes I worry," he admitted. "I didn't go looking for this, but sometimes I wonder if she doesn't think she's repaying me."

Sam sat down on the tailgate of the truck. "She doesn't," she said, reluctantly.

"How do you know?"

"Because I know that was the one thing she wouldn't do for her so-called mentor," Sam admitted. "I never thought you would have forced her or coerced her," she assured him, "it's just that she belongs in this time and you belong in ours. What is she going to do when you have to leave her?"

"Actually, I was thinking of bringing her with us," Jack replied. "She doesn't have a place in this time, Carter. Until I showed up, she was supposed to take a bullet in the back of the head."

"No!"

"Yes."

"Did the SS decide she'd outlived her usefulness?" Sam asked.

Jack shook his head. "The resistance tried to kill her," he explained.

"Huh. Well, that makes sense," Sam admitted. "I just didn't..."

"Didn't like to think of _our_ side wanting to kill someone so sweet and innocent?"

Sam shrugged. "Although the thought that she was out of the way would have made me feel a little better."

"Why?"

"Because she may be an unutterable drip, but she _is_ smarter than me," Sam admitted. "I hardly let anything slip to her but everything I gave her sent her mind off in new directions; she practically developed a new theory of temporal manipulation in front of my eyes. It's just so unfair! Why should someone so lacking in backbone have a brain like that."

"Well, I..."

"Jack!"

Jack turned and Sam stood as Weiss ran towards them. She had left the bolt cutters somewhere and her face was flushed with worry.

"What's wrong, Inge?" Jack asked.

"It's the padlock," Weiss gasped. "The padlock on the chains."

"What about it?" Sam asked. "Didn't the cutters work?" A shiver ran up her spine; a lock that resisted those cutters was likely to be another sign of future influence.

Weiss shook her head. "It cut alright," she panted, "but...The chain was covered in rust, but the lock was covered in mud. The mud cracked off when I cut the lock and I could see that it was..." She reached into the pocket of her coat and held up a heavy padlock. It was indeed coated in frozen mud, and where it had cracked off the metal shone brilliantly.

"Almost new," Sam realised.

"Teal'c!" Jack strode off; Sam and Weiss followed and Teal'c soon appeared, running out of the farmhouse to catch up with them.

 

Having seen no sign of Red Army patrols, Tom and Lotte headed back towards the farm. Distracted by his concern for Amy's safety, Tom walked right past the trail and Lotte had to call him back.

"Hoof prints?" he asked.

"Just one set, I think," she replied, studying the tracks. The main track to the farmhouse was as hard as rock, so there were no tracks, but here in the trees the ground was not quite frozen and a single line of hoof prints had indeed been impressed into the earth.

"It looks recent as well," Tom noted. "Moving away from the farmhouse, but still..."

As though emerging from his thoughts, the sound of pounding hooves filled the air.

 

At the barn, Jack threw his P90 to Weiss and hauled on the left-hand door. Teal'c took the other door, while Sam and Weiss held their weapons at the ready. The heavy doors swung open, to reveal that the barn was in fact a garage and storeroom, stacked with gas cans and heavy crates. A crowbar lay on top of on of the nearest crates and Jack used this to lever up the lid.

"Ah, damn," he muttered.

"What is it?" Sam asked, although she had a feeling that she knew the answer.

Jack reached into the crate and picked up a Tokarev SVT-40. "We've just set up shop in a gun-runners' lair."

*

_2001_

Leaving the Borte and the border guards behind, Svetlana and the FSB agents followed Major Rasputina through the wilderness. As they walked, Rasputina filled them in on the history of the site.

"This has always been considered a cursed place," she explained. "It is considered by many to be the third most evil place in all of the old Soviet territories."

"What are the top two?" Karpova asked.

"Tunguska and Chernobyl. The bunker is several stories high and runs around ten storeys deep into the ground. It was built during the war as a fortress against all conventional forms of assault and, although probably vulnerable to nuclear attack, it would still stand up well today.

"During the building of the bunker, a mass grave was uncovered and dozens of workmen were killed, although that was par for the course on a construction project in Siberia. Stalin didn't send people out here because he wanted them to feel loved in the gulags," Rasputina noted.

"What was this place built _for_?" Svetlana asked.

"Rocketry research," Rasputina replied. "There was a project to develop an answer to the German V-weapons, but nothing came of it. An accident destroyed the entire laboratory, but the structure is almost indestructible. For fifty years, the authorities tried to find something to do with it."

"Why not tear it down?" Karpova asked.

Djerovich chuckled. "If a bunker has been built to withstand shelling and aerial bombardment, it will be almost impossible to demolish," he assured his partner. "There are concrete blisters like this all over Europe, built during the war and too much trouble to destroy."

Rasputina nodded her agreement, and then went on: "In this case, the structure is built around three-dozen steel-and-concrete piles, buried more than forty metres below ground. The reinforced concrete walls still carry eighteen miles of copper wiring and nine of copper pipe and I'm assured that most of the water and electrics still function, even if they are a little antiquated. Whatever the accident that gutted the original laboratory, the utilities in the wall ducts were untouched.

"After the war, the bunker was used to house an experimental atomic pile," she went on. "Nothing much came of that either and they moved the pile out. Then it was done out as a shelter for senior officials, in case of war with the United States, but the water table had been contaminated by the run-off from the pile's coolant flow and a lot of people got sick. When Communism collapsed they sold the site off as soon as possible, without mentioning the problem with the groundwater." She held up a hand. "Quiet now; we're approaching the perimeter."

The four Russians crept forward to a line of trees and looked out at the bunker. It was a massive, sinister structure, more like a temple than a military bunker. The low, flat-topped mastaba of the bunker itself was flanked by four concrete obelisks. The figures of the guards who walked at the foot of the wall were tiny and with a start, Svetlana realised that the mastaba was not low at all, merely dwarfed by the towering obelisks.

"What are those for?" she asked.

"The towers?" Rasputina asked. "No-one knows. There are ducts buried in the concrete and power lines running into them, but they go deep down and the concrete – if that's what it is – seems to be almost impervious, even to the hardest drill bits. A team of engineers spent three years working on them, but to no avail."

The bunker sat at the heart of a compound, ringed by a razor-wire fence. The ground within the boundary and for a hundred metres around it had been cleared of undergrowth. Towers stood at regular intervals along the line of the fence, manned by guards with machine guns and rifles. Incongruously, a huge sign faced them, bearing the image of a cheerfully smiling cartoon cow.

"They must really love their milk," Karpova noted.

Djerovich shook his head. "I need to get inside," he said.

Rasputina nodded. "That can be arranged."

*

_1944_

Mariana took a light luncheon with Daniel, over which she extolled the virtues of her launch system.

"In order to save fuel and protect the dwelling chambers from rocket exhaust, I have commissioned a magnetic accelerator."

"A mass driver?" Daniel asked. "I know the Nazis made a lot of technical advances, but the linear accelerator was not one of them."

Mariana shrugged. "It was difficult to build such a mechanism from these primitive materials," she admitted, "and the accelerator rails had to be significantly longer than usual..."

"The obelisks," Daniel realised.

His hostess' lips curled into a hungry smile. "Your perceptiveness and understanding continue to impress me, Daniel," she said.

"I'm sorry not to disappoint you," Daniel drawled.

Mariana stood, suddenly, and strode around the table. She caught Daniel by the lapels and dragged him up into a kiss. With some effort, he wrestled free of her before the bile could rise in his throat. He bent double and retched.

"Still you reject me!" Mariana hissed.

"You're a monster, Ahriman," Daniel accused.

The blue eyes flared and the Goa'uld spoke to Daniel. "You knew that before, my darling," she purred. "I never pretended to be anything else. Can you not master these scruples? Not even for the sake of the children?"

"Not even for them," Daniel gasped, wiping his chin. "I can't...not when all I see is what you did to those people."

With a cry of disgust, Ahriman overturned the table and flung it against the wall. "You did not know them!" she roared. "They were nothing to you!"

"They were _people_!" Daniel insisted. "Besides, you're about to do the same to everyone I know or care about, if they even manage to be born in your world."

With her left hand, Ahriman grabbed Daniel by the front of his shirt and thrust him against the wall, while her right hand – as though belonging to a different person – caressed his face lovingly. "The world is doomed," she murmured. "You can not save it, but you can save the children."

"I can't," Daniel choked.

A chuckle rose in Ahriman's throat, somewhere between mockery and tenderness. "We shall see," she purred and then, in the voice of Mariana Veidt, continued: "I am almost glad; it had all been too easy up until now." She released him and smoothed down his shirt, solicitously. "You know that Iblis wants to use you as his body," she noted.

"Nice to be in demand," Daniel said dryly.

"It isn't you that he wants," Mariana assured him.

"Of course not," Daniel replied. "It's _you_. She...he... _it_ thinks that if it is in my body, you'll snuggle up to..."

"Him," Mariana said. "Iblis adopts the gender of his host and so, in your body, he would be ‘he', as in Frau Zelig's, she is ‘she' and in the form of Zerref Ch'a, loi was ‘loi'."

Daniel could not stop himself rising to the bait. "Loi?" he asked.

"The pronoun for an amale," Mariana explained. "A sort of reproductively passive gender, acting purely as an incubation chamber for the combined seeds of the male and female of the droin. They were an interesting species," she mused. "The amales had a deeply ingrained sense of self-loathing that made them quite needy; Zerref Ch'a was almost as desperate for affection as Iblis herself," she added. "I used to have such fun playing them off against one another. I truly think that Iblis hated Zerref as much as loi hated laself by the end of their association."

Daniel shivered. "I notice that you speak of the species in the past tense," he said.

Mariana shrugged. "I have not encountered them in some time," she admitted. "I did _not_ ," she added, "annihilate them; their rebellion was minor and called only for decimation. Zerref Ch'a is dead, of course, but mortals die."

"And does Earth require annihilation or decimation?" Daniel demanded.

"Lord Sokar requested annihilation," Mariana admitted, "but I no longer feel bound to his will. I intend to cull the population heavily, but I find my whim leads me now towards rule, not merely devastation. And to rule, I must have subjects," she added.

"What are you going to do with the missile?" Daniel demanded.

"Now that I have converted to the cause of communism," Mariana explained, "I will target the V-En at Berlin, ending the threat of Nazi Germany forever, in the name of Mother Russia!"

Daniel gave a humourless laugh. "Or at least, that's what you told Comrade Stalin to get permission to build the bunker," he said.

"You learn fast," she said approvingly.

*

The riders streamed into the farmyard at the gallop. For Jack, a thoroughly modern warrior, it was an object lesson in the strengths of a disciplined cavalry force against exposed infantry. Even Teal'c had barely had time to react to the thunder of hoof beats before there were riders all around them, swathed in long coats, furry hats pulled tight over their heads and toting a mixture of SVT-40s and PPSh-41 submachine guns. They held their weapons in a professional, two-handed grip, guiding their horses with their knees and holding a steady aim despite the movement of the steeds beneath them.

One of the riders snapped a command in Russian, but it was too fast for Jack to make out what he was saying.

The man tried again, this time in German. "Setzen Sie Ihre Waffen aus den Grund und heben Sie Ihre Hände über Ihren Kopf an!"

Jack was glad that Daniel was not here to get them into trouble by answering in German.

"We are American," he said.

Another rider moved forward. "Yankee soldiers?" he asked, doubtfully.

"No," Jack assured him. "We're not with the military." There was no doubt in Jack's mind that the weapons these men were stockpiling were military issue and most armies frowned on stealing munitions in a time of war.

"Then you will not be missed by anyone," the rider pointed out. He half-turned and called something in Russian to his comrades.

To Jack's surprise, Inge stepped forward and called back. The rider stared at her for a moment, then muttered a curse and brought his rifle to his shoulder.

"Hold your fire!" A third man eased his horse out of the group and it was at once apparent that he was in command here. He sat high and proud in the saddle of the finest horse in the group, an animal with a noble bearing and an intelligent face, full of character. The man himself was no less striking, with a handsome, aquiline face, long, drooping moustaches and a truly impressive fur hat. He wore a dark grey, officer's greatcoat and a long, curved scimitar hung at his hip.

The leader barked a command and sprang smoothly to the ground. His followers did the same, more cautiously and in two groups, one covering Jack's party while the other dismounted.

Jack leaned over to whisper to Inge. "What did you say to him?"

"Well, he said something bad about your mother, so I...defended her."

"You defended my mother?" Jack asked, doubtfully. The English-speaking rider was still glaring murderously at Inge.

"Well, I may have offered a less-than flattering opinion of _his_ mother," Inge admitted.

"You will lay down your weapons and step back, please," the leader said.

"Colonel?" Sam asked.

"Do as he says, Carter," Jack sighed. "Best we could do is take some of them with us."

They set their weapons on the ground and stepped away, allowing several of the riders to advance and gather up their submachine guns.

The second rider began to speak in Russian, but at a curt gesture from his leader he switched to English. "These are German weapons," he noted.

"And a German truck," another man added. "They must be German spies, damn those Nazi bastards!"

The leader turned and pointed at the speaker. "Hold your tongue!" he barked. "I will not have that kind of language spoken in front of a lady." He turned to face Inge and Sam. "Please forgive our crude ways," he said. "We are simple men and used to plain speech."

"You're forgiven," Sam assured him dryly.

The leader smiled and directed his gaze only at Inge. "Although your language is none too moderate, dear lady," he noted.

Inge shrank back against Jack's side and Jack put an arm around her.

"But I am forgetting my manners," the leader said. "I am His Excellency Nicolai Tevyavich Rasputin, Bandit Khan, Terror of the Wehrmacht, Scourge of the Soviets and second cousin to the late, lamented Gregori Efimovich."

"Colonel Jack O'Neill," Jack replied. "Pleased to..." He broke off in alarm as the self-styled Bandit Khan seized his shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.

"Why is the Scourge of the Soviets wearing a Red Army officer's greatcoat?" Sam asked.

"My second-in-command, Major Samantha Carter," Jack introduced. "This is Teal'c – he kills gods – and Frau Dr Inge Weiss, Physicist, Linguist and all-round Super-Genius."

Inge blushed.

"It is a pleasure to meet such distinguished and civilised people," Nicolai Tevyavich declared. "As to the coat; well, I did consider embracing the new order and becoming the Commissar of the Bandits, but the image simply did not work for me. I do like the coat, however."

"I see," Jack said.

Yuri Tevyavich beamed at them. "Bring them inside and tie them up," he ordered.

*

Frau Zelig's bullet wound was largely healed, but still ached terribly. Iblis was growing increasingly irritable and being obliged to mind Ahriman's business while the mistress devoted herself to seducing Daniel Jackson did not help. The only ray of sunlight in her existence was that, for the first time since Ahriman's return, Iblis was being allowed to work directly with her beloved Dahak Casket.

For most people, the Casket was an object of terror, a source of unspeakable evil and a bringer of fury, death and destruction. There were, however, a few individuals in whom the energies radiated from the living tesseract known as Dahak generated a quite different response. Whenever the seals of the Ancient-built Casket were released, Iblis experienced a surge of unquenchable desire, a lust as insatiable and irresistible as the fury that gripped the common man or woman. For Iblis, therefore, the Casket was a giving thing, and the Dahak entity the only creature in the universe who had ever given her anything without asking for something in return. Ahriman loved the Casket for the power that it gave her; Iblis simply loved Dahak, with all her black and ruined heart.

She stood now on the gantry beside the nosecone of the V-En rocket and watched, breathless with anticipation, as the Casket was lowered down from the surface. A Russian technician stood with her, directing the crane controller through a radio telephone, but she was all-but oblivious to anything except the descending shape of the Casket.

As the Casket reached the level of the gantry, Zelig waved for the crane to halt.

"Stop," the technician ordered. "Alright, now run it back and..."

"Not yet!" Zelig snapped.

"Hold it," the technician echoed.

"Run out the cradle," Zelig ordered, "but first I must..." She licked her lips, eagerly. "I must examine the Casket." She had felt frustrated of late. Ahriman was obsessed by Jackson and Iblis had failed even to seduce a serving girl to slake her needs; to make matters worse, she had been forced to leave her regular lover, the faithless but oh-so athletic Hauptsturmführer von Lieberman, in Pfronten. The desire to feel the caress of Dahak's powerful energy field had never been so strong.

The technician went over to the nose-cone of the rocket and opened the heavy steel hatch in its side. Behind the hatch lay a second heavy steel cover, with a wheel at the centre. The technician turned the wheel to release the locks and lowered the hatch down on its hydraulic rams, exposing the interior of the resonating chamber. A cradle of steel bands hung in the centre of the chamber and the technician drew this out on a set of expanding runners.

Zelig saw none of this. She was gazing raptly at the Casket, her hands hovering nervously over the surface. She licked her lips again and then let herself touch the flawlessly smooth surface of the casket. She felt the power of the Dahak entity, even through inches of stone and three layers of the most powerful stasis fields even devised. Her fingertips tingled and her heart began to race. Without true volition her fingers traced the sigils on the Casket, which appeared to be carved into the surface of the stone, but in fact lay _beneath_ the surface. The sigils formed a pattern, a circle around a triangle, both cut by numerous strokes, lines and swirls.

At her touch, the sigils changed position, sliding under the stone until all trace of the pattern was gone, releasing the outer seal. Her hands continued to move, manipulating the markings to release the middle seal. The sigils glowed brightly and began to slither under the surface of their own accord. Zelig's breath came in short, sharp gasps and, when the lid of the casket cracked and the grey radiance of the filtered Dahak energies spilled out across her, her whole body shuddered in an orgasmic spasm.

"Comrade Zelig?" the technician asked, nervously. "Comrade; the cradle is ready."

"Remove your shoes," Zelig gasped.

"Comrade?"

Zelig reached out and laid her hand on the crystal surface that lay within the outer Casket. The crystal was cloudy, but where the sigils had been graven within the surface it became perfectly clear and the absolute, radiant blackness of the tesseract showed clearly.

"When the seals are opened, the Dahak energies will be released," she explained. "The gantry is made of metal and supported on piles that have been sunk deep into the earth in order to dissipate those energies, but unless you are connected to the metal, you will be influenced by Dahak's power. Take your shoes and socks off," she said again.

"Yes, Comrade," the technician agreed, and he crouched to unlace his boots.

Zelig leaned against the crystal container and pressed her face to its surface. This was as close as she had ever been to Dahak and as close as she ever would. For her to touch the creature itself would be to embrace instant annihilation. With a sigh, she stepped away and picked up the radio telephone. "Move the Casket into the cradle," she ordered.

The crane clanked and clattered and the Casket juddered into place. For a moment, it caught on the edge of the cradle, but Zelig eased it into place with a lover's care. She released the straps and eased the harness out of the way. The technician – now barefoot – took up the radio telephone and at his instruction the harness and chains were whipped up towards the ceiling of the chamber.

With a gentle push, the delicately-balanced bearings of the cradle runners carried the Casket into the resonating chamber in the nose of the rocket. Zelig reached for the sigils.

"Your shoes, Comrade!" the technician warned.

Zelig shot him a sinister smile, then slid her hands over the crystalline surface. The inner seals of the Casket were released and the crystal lid cracked open. The pure, black light of Dahak poured out and covered Zelig, firing every nerve in her skin with a rush of sensation so pure that it was neither pleasure nor pain, but something that transcended both.

With some regret, Zelig resisted the urge to step into the darkness and allow herself to be consumed. Instead she stepped backwards, reached down and grasped the hatch of the resonating chamber. The hatch slammed closed and the black light was shut out. Zelig turned the wheel to lock the chamber, and then closed the nose cone.

"Is that all, Comrade?" the technician asked.

"Almost," Zelig replied. She reached behind her and seized the technician by the front of his shirt. She swung him around and slammed him against the slope of the nose cone.

"C-Comrade!"

Zelig leaned her body hard against the technician, oblivious to the spark of pain that ignited from her half-healed wounds, and forced her mouth against his. "Just one last thing to do," she panted, with a hint of desperation.

*

"Am I the only one starting to lose track here?" Sally Carter asked in a whisper.

"A group of Nazi occultists were working in Bavaria, but then they packed up shop and shipped out to Siberia," Duncan replied. "A group of unknown agents followed them. Now the Nazis are working with the Red Army and this lot have been captured by bandits."

"What's not to get?" Mathias asked.

The three members of the Cataclysm team lay in the woods, looking out at the farmhouse. The bandits had set a watch, but they were much better at taking people unawares than they were at detecting an impending ambush. As it turned out, this was true of the team as well.

"Oh, just wait. It gets much better than this."

Duncan turned first, but the young man in the Red Army greatcoat already had a carbine pointed at his head. Sally rolled over and drew her pistol, but Mathias stayed quite still; a girl lay beside him with a knife held to his throat.

"Where did she come from?" Duncan demanded.

"Scary, isn't it," Tom said.

"Where did _you_ come from?" Duncan added. "Who are you?"

Tom shrugged. "I'll leave the introductions to the people who already know one another," he said.

The girl lifted herself into a crouch; her knife...disappeared. Duncan stifled a gasp, shocked by the scarred mess of the girl's face.

"Lotte!" Sally gasped.

"Hello, Dr Carter," Lotte replied. "This is Tom Keeler," she added.

"Hi," Sally said, weakly. "These are...well, names aren't..."

"Duncan O'Neill and Mathias Jackson," Tom finished, for her. "Let's not stand on ceremony or secrecy. We need your help to rescue our friends," he explained.

"And why should we care?" Duncan asked, although he was aware that the newcomers could have killed his entire team if they had wanted to.

Tom chuckled. "Oh, you'll care," he assured them. "But you could be in for a shock."

*

_2001_

Major Rasputina led Djerovich along the edge of a river that had become a sewer. The river had, in its time, cut a deep culvert in the tundra, but it had been dammed to provide water to the bunker – no doubt as an alternative to the contaminated groundwater – and now the flow was thick, sluggish and foetid. Ahead of them, a wide outflow gaped high up on the bank, from which a terrible stink emerged.

"Lovely," Djerovich growled.

Rasputina chuckled, dryly. "You're one to talk, with those horrible cigarettes that you smoke."

"Never did me..." Djerovich broke off and his expression became mournful.

Rasputina did not press the matter. "It's not much further," she promised.

"A small, steel door in the rear wall," Djerovich noted. "It seems a little fortuitous. Surely the security here is better than that."

"The security is excellent," Rasputin replied. "The door is an inch thick, and in one of the outbuildings, rather than the factory itself. It's at the end of a sort of emergency escape tunnel and virtually impregnable _unless_ you have a man on the inside."

"Then we put all our trust in your insider?" Djerovich asked.

Rasputina shrugged. "As I say, Vasiliy Nicholaevich tells me that I can trust him."

"But your husband has never met the man," Djerovich recalled.

"True," Rasputina admitted. "I don't pretend to understand that, but for myself I also trust the man. He has an honest face, if a suspicious name."

"Suspicious name?"

Rasputina laughed. "The man is English," she explained, "and he has the name of false couples: Smith."

They fell silent as they crept through the undergrowth to the outbuilding. It was a squat, concrete cylinder; a fortification of the type that were known as pillboxes and which had been designed to stand off attacking tanks. The long slit-window had been sealed with a heavy, metal shutter, welded crudely in place and the door was a single, massive sheet of steel.

"Now _that_ is a good door," Djerovich admitted.

"It is very serious," Rasputina agreed. She reached up and rapped gently on the door.

There was a soft clunk and the door swung inward to reveal a tall, brawny man in grey overalls. "Hello, Major Rasputina," he said, in thickly-accented Russian. "This the expert?"

"Hello, Mr Smith," she replied. "Yes; this is Major Djerovich. He needs to see what they make here."

Smith nodded once. "Come inside, then," he said. "I've got a couple of overalls for you to change into. Yours might be a little tight," he told Djerovich, apologetically. "I didn't know you were going to be so big."

Djerovich shrugged his broad shoulders. "I haven't owned a suit that fit in ten years," he assured Smith.

 

Smith brought the two Majors through the hidden tunnel that connected the pillbox to a disused storeroom in the main bunker. As they went, he explained that the tunnel had been constructed and then bricked over after the first abandonment of the laboratory. When Djerovich asked why anyone would simply build and then block up a tunnel, Smith just smiled enigmatically. The storeroom itself was another mystery. It was rather dusty and there was a faint scent of mould in the air, but, nestled among the rotted old brooms and collapsed and mildewed swastika-marked crates, Rasputina noted a new bench, on which a collection of pristine electronic components lay strewn around a strange and arcane-looking device. Smith was just as unforthcoming about that, and about the thin chain that ran from the heel of the work boots he had provided, connecting a metal cuff inside each boot to the ground.

From the storeroom they crept through the corridors and up the stairs to a walkway overlooking a large, open chamber in the centre of the bunker. The roof of the chamber boasted a pair of massive shutters, which had long-since rusted closed, but it was the floor that interested the agents.

"I thought this was a drug processing laboratory," Djerovich whispered.

"It is," Smith assured him. "The processing room is down below, in one of the subbasements." He reached into his pocket and produced a pair of silver pillboxes. "There's a group of about fifteen scientists down there, pulping the snow lilies, treating the pulp and turning it into this."

He held out the first pillbox. Djerovich took the box and opened it; inside was a heavy, floury, pale-green powder. "This isn't Dragon," Djerovich said, sounding disappointed.

"But this isn't the finished product," Smith assured him. "After they get it to this form, they place the powder in large crucibles and...Well, look down below."

Djerovich complied, joining Rasputina at the rail. On the floor of the chamber, where the plans for the factory asserted there to be a pasteurisation tank, stood a crude stone altar. A steady procession of men walked round and round this altar in groups of four, each group carrying between them, on long poles, one of the crucibles that Smith had spoken of. The men themselves were clad in black robes and they moved with a rattle and clank from the chains fastened to their ankles.

All this Djerovich took in, before his attention was entirely captured by the shape on the altar. It was a quartz sarcophagus, its lid split open to reveal the crystalline coffin within. An unnatural black light issued from the surface of the coffin and it was this anti-illumination that caught and held Djerovich's gaze. The sight of that unholy casket terrified him as nothing ever had. Staring into the blackness, he felt as he had done when he had realised that Leva was dying, but a billion times over, as though he were gazing on the embodied mortality of every living thing on Earth.

"And when they carry the crucibles to the packing plant and compact the powder into tablets, they get this," Smith said, proffering the second pillbox.

Djerovich took the box in a trembling hand and tore his eyes from the altar. With an effort of will, he set aside the turmoil raging in his soul and opened the box. Inside lay a small, innocuous red tablet, its only distinguishing feature a coiled wyrm, stamped into the smooth surface. To Djerovich, the tiny pill seemed to ooze menace.

"Dragon," he growled.

 

"So we strike from within," Rasputina agreed, "but we still need more manpower."

"I accept that," Djerovich assured her. "I just don't know who we can trust. We must not let that ape Pavlov get hold of a thing like that. I have no idea what it is, but I'm pretty sure he could kill a lot of people finding out."

"There are other border guards," Rasputina assured him. "It may take time to gather them..."

"Time is the one thing that we do not have," he reminded her. "I do not believe that we can afford to let this plant continue to operate for a moment longer than we can avoid. We must find an army or..."

He broke off as they crested a rise and saw the Borte and her crew below them.

"My God," Djerovich murmured.

The BTR-70 was no longer alone. Major Rasputina's border patrol had been joined by several dozen horsemen who had apparently set up camp, even building a few cooking fires, carefully banked and watched over in case of smoke. There were wagons drawn up, sentries stood watch, and in the middle of the camp, a pair of BTR-60s flanked the Borte like slightly-decrepit elder sisters, watched over by the looming, indomitable bulk of a T-62 main battle tank.

Djerovich dropped flat at the top of the ridge, but Major Rasputina strode fearlessly up and over and marched purposefully towards the camp. Warily, Djerovich rose and followed. Close to the Borte, the border patrol were sharing a pot of coffee with the crew of the T-62; Rasputina waved a greeting to her men, then headed straight for a fire where Dr Markova and Sabina Karpova sat with the most extraordinary figure that Djerovich had ever seen. The man was small and wiry, with a long moustache; he wore a fur hat and a full-length fur coat over a rough, woollen smock and trousers, and a scimitar hung from his belt in a horse-hide scabbard. But for the assault rifle in his hands, this man could have been a Mongol raider of the thirteenth century. If Genghis Khan had stepped out of the past and been given a crash course with the AK-74M, he would have looked like this man.

All three stood as Djerovich and Rasputina approached.

 "Vaska!" Major Rasputina cried, delighted. To Djerovich's astonishment, she flew at the strange little man, wound her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist. He in his turn clasped her about the waist with one arm and looped the other supportively beneath her rear. Standing thus, in a tangle of limbs, with combat boots and high-powered rifles jutting out at all angles, they kissed passionately.

"The husband?" Djerovich asked his partner wryly.

Sabina nodded. "They showed up just after we got back. No-one called them, it seems, but Rasputin insists that he knew we'd need help. He gave Dr Markova a letter and now she's acting all enigmatic. It's not a very fetching pose," she noted acidly.

"I am sorry," Markova said sincerely. "I can not explain and it is not merely a matter of secrecy. All will become clear," she promised.

The Rasputins disentangled themselves from each other and – after a short struggle with the shoulder sling of the Major's rifle and one of the flap-ties of her husband's hat, they turned to face their allies.

Rasputin drew the scimitar from his belt and saluted. "Major Djerovich; Vasiliy Nicholaevich Rasputin, at your service. The men and women of the last of the Golden Hordes stand ready to assist you."

"I understood that you were a _retired_ arms dealer," Djerovich noted, eyeing the tank.

"Quite so," Rasputin assured him. "I simply put a little away for a rainy day. We have been readying this force for quite some time. My career in drugs I put entirely behind me," he added.

"You knew about this place?" Djerovich asked.

"Not as such," Rasputin replied. "As Dr Markova says, all will become clear. In the meantime, we have plans to lay."

*

_1944_

"So what's brought about this conversion from destruction to dominion?" Daniel asked. "I can't believe that possessing the body of a Nazi occultist can have made you merciful."

"No, indeed," Mariana chuckled. "Actually, the contribution of her personality to my current outlook is negligible. You see, in the moment that I took her, Mariana Veidt's feeble, mortal brain underwent an almost total collapse. She believed my former host – whom you saw in the recording sphere – to be a great captain of Ultima Thule."

Daniel conjured up the picture of Ahriman's former host. "So when she saw that he was black..." he realised.

Mariana laughed again. "Fanaticism can give a person such energy and drive," she mused, "but it is a great risk to rest so much on a single truth. With the realisation that her innate supremacy, her psychic gifts and her perfect kingdom were nothing more than pathetic fantasies, her tiny mind gave up completely. Every sin she had committed against the God she had abandoned, the mother she had denounced and the innocents she had slaughtered rose up to haunt her in the moment of realisation that no higher purpose justified her actions. When she took the life of a Jewish girl on the altar, there was no sanctity in the act, it was merely murder; all of her great ideals had been based on a lie. I entered her body just in time to feel her break and to revel in her absolute surrender. She welcomed oblivion and I gave it to her, freely."

"I'm surprised you didn't force her to suffer," Daniel noted.

Mariana shrugged. "Why take the trouble, when with far less effort I could enjoy a single, transcendent moment of the most intense and genuine worship I have ever experienced?"

Daniel gave a single, short laugh. "And that's what gave you the taste for power over others?"

"Perhaps it is," Mariana admitted, sounding surprised by the idea. "Certainly it was a pleasurable experience. She wasn't afraid of me," she mused. "She welcomed me, almost with adoration. Maybe that is why I like the child so much; she also welcomes me, instead of fearing me." She took a step closer to him. "You know, Daniel..."

"No!" he replied, harshly. "I've feared and hated you all along."

"No you haven't," she corrected. "Not at the height of it. Not when all that lay between us was desire and the thunder of blood in our ears. At that moment, you welcomed me, Daniel."

"No."

"Yes," she whispered. "Deny it all you like, but you know that it is true. Just for a heartbeat, perhaps, but it happened; when your mind shut down and you thought only with your body and all there was to feel was the need of me."

"You flatter yourself," Daniel assured her, although he was no longer certain. "Anyway, you still haven't told me what you are really going to do with the Casket."

"What would you do?" she challenged. "If you were me?"

"I'd kill myself," he assured her.

"Self-sacrifice is not in my nature."

Daniel sighed. "If I were you?" he asked. "I'd wait until the Allies invaded and then, when the fighting was just past its peak and the liberated nations behind the front were stoning collaborators and shaving the heads of girls who slept with Germans, I'd drop the Dahak Casket; probably right in the middle of Berlin, just like Uncle Joe ordered, only it wouldn't just wipe out the Germans. With Europe already on fire, so much hatred against the Nazis just beginning to find expression and the concentrated, resonated power of Dahak released all at once, this bunker in Siberia would be the closest you could get to Berlin without being wiped out.

"And you're expecting the fighting to reach back here," he noted. "That's why this place is such a fortress."

Mariana smiled, beatifically. "There are means of protection against the effect," she told him. "I have squads dotted around Europe with earthed boots. When the V-En arrives, they will go into hiding and those who survive will bring the Casket from Berlin to Istanbul and thence through Asia into China. Can you imagine it?" she asked, breathless with anticipation. "Dahak set loose in China after the atrocities committed there?"

"And then to America?" Daniel asked.

"By way of the Pacific theatre," she agreed. "The fighting is bloody enough. I have contacts in Japan, training a cadre of modern samurai warriors, who will be impregnated with the Dahak energies and make an attack on the west coast of the United States. They will kill hundreds; the Americans will do the rest themselves."

"You are _insane_!" he accused.

"Perhaps," she laughed, delightedly, "but you had the same ideas. You know as well as I do that it will work!"

Daniel's gut squirmed unpleasantly.

"If you are less monstrous than I, darling Daniel," Mariana crooned, "it is not in the goodness of your soul, only in the softness of your will. A little more tempering and you would be like me; you have the mind for this work," she applauded.

Daniel turned away in disgust, but could not turn away from himself.

Mariana walked past him. She brushed her arm against his and prowled slowly to the bedroom door. "I am going to bed now," she announced. "You are of course welcome to join me."

Daniel stared at the ruins of the table, wondering if he could take one of the cracked table legs and batter Ahriman to death in her sleep. It was just fancy, however; no Goa'uld ever let her guard down that much and she was far too strong for him, even half-asleep.

Instead, Daniel threw himself down on the couch, closed his eyes and tried very hard to black out.

*

"Look," Jack said, impatiently, as the bandits manhandled his team into the kitchen of the farmhouse. "You have no idea who it is that's moving into that bunker."

"Let me guess," Nicolai Tevyavich drawled. "Nazis?"

"Aliens," Jack replied.

Nicolai Tevyavich stared at him for a long moment and then laughed out loud. His men paused in the process of retrieving the wood, pots and crockery that had been hidden away to create the appearance of abandonment.

"Aliens?" the Bandit Khan asked. "You mean, little green men?"

Sam shot Jack a look.

"Well, it was worth a try," he protested. "The point is that what's in that bunker makes your everyday, garden variety Nazi look like a boy scout with an attitude problem."

Nicolai Tevyavich shook his head.

"You don't believe me?" Jack asked.

"Believe you?" Nicolai Tevyavich laughed. "I don't even understand you. My English may be better than your Russian, but..."

Inge gave vent to a stream of Russian. Neither Sam nor Jack understood one word in five, but from the expression of awe on Nicolai Tevyavich's face, her diatribe was both compelling and colourful. When she finally finished, she stood slightly breathless, with her hands held out in appeal.

Nicolai Tevyavich looked back and forth between Inge and Jack. "You're a lucky man," he told Jack.

"Yeah," Jack grunted. "I always thank my lucky stars when I'm being tied up by Siberian arms dealers."

"You do this a lot?" Sam asked.

"Once or twice."

"You're familiar with our country?" Nicolai Tevyavich asked.

"We get around," Sam assured him.

"And you?" the bandit asked Teal'c.

"I have been in Russia only once before," Teal'c replied, "but that will not be for some years."

"Well then, I welcome you all back to..." Nicolai Tevyavich blinked owlishly. "Wait. What?"

The door burst open and a young bandit lad ran in. "Nicolai Tevyavich!" he gasped. "The sentries have not answered the signal."

Nicolai Tevyavich made use of immoderate language and then gave instructions in Russian. He reached for his own rifle, but at that moment the door to the remains of the kitchen garden opened and another bandit entered, wrapped tightly in fur-lined coat and cap. It took a moment for the bandits to realise that they did not recognise the newcomer and in that moment their leader was seized and a blade held to his throat.

The bandits lifted their weapons, but Nicolai Tevyavich held up his hand as the knife pressed against his windpipe. "Nothing rash!" he snapped.

"Good advice," Tom agreed, following the well-wrapped Lotte through the door. Three more armed figures entered in his wake.

"Good God!" Sam gasped.

"Oh my!" Sally replied.

"Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c asked, uncertainly.

"Who's Daniel?" Mathias asked.

Sam and Sally both looked back and forth between Duncan and Jack. "It's uncanny," Sam whispered.

"What is?" Duncan asked.

"He must be your...grandfather?" Sam asked.

"How can you tell?" Jack asked.

Sally looked confused. "Well...the resemblance."

"I don't see it," the two O'Neills chorused.

The two Carters glanced at each other and rolled their eyes.

"The other bandits won't be bothering us," Tom assured them. "If you gentlemen would lay down your weapons?"

There was some hesitation, but Nicolai Tevyavich echoed the instructions in Russian and the bandits lay down their weapons. The erstwhile captives tied up the bandits, coming last to Rasputin. As Lotte released him, the self-styled Bandit Khan turned to face the woman who had taken him captive. At the sight of her scarred and twisted face, he gasped aloud.

To Sam's surprise, Lotte took a step away from him and cast her eyes downwards. Nicolai Tevyavich reached out at once and caught Lotte's hand; the young woman flinched at the contact, but made no attempt to free herself from his grip as he lifted his other hand to trace the pattern of knife cuts on her face. Lotte's eyes flickered upwards and caught Rasputin's gaze. Sam could not hear what the Bandit Khan said to the Ghost, but her blush turned her scars a deep purple.

Nicolai Tevyavich gazed deep into Lotte's eyes and brushed his thumb softly down the length of the cut which passed down her face and through her left eyelid. "Did he pay?" he asked.

"With his life," she replied shyly. "I sabotaged his rifle," she added, moving closer to him. "It blew up in his face. He looked like me when they buried him."

"Surely not so beautiful?" Rasputin asked, with every sign of sincerity.

"Excuse me!" Jack and Duncan snapped as one. They turned and glowered at one another.

"Lotte," Sam called gently. "I don't like to interfere in your private life, but we need to tie the bad man up. And not in a good way."

Lotte's blush deepened, but it was Nicolai Tevyavich who stepped away. "I look forward to continuing this discussion later," he told Lotte.

"The feeling is mutual," she assured him.

Tom took Rasputin away to restrain him and Lotte trailed after them, leaving Jack, Sam and Teal'c to face Duncan, Sally and Mathias. Inge had seen Sally eyeing her thoughtfully and thus retreated to the range to make up the fire.

"So," Mathias said, pointing at Teal'c. "You're _not_ my grandson, are you?"

"I am not," Teal'c replied, "although it is my honour to know Daniel Jackson."

"Yes, you said. Daniel," Mathias mused. "It's a good name."

"Okay," Jack said impatiently. "So you're Grampa Dunc," he said curtly.

"Major Duncan O'Neill," Duncan replied darkly. "Less of the Grampa while you're the one with the grey hair. This is Dr Sally Carter and Dr Mathias Jackson," he added. "And you are?"

Jack narrowed his eyes. " _Colonel_ Jack O'Neill," he replied. "This is Major Sam Carter, Teal'c, and that's Dr Inge Weiss."

Inge cringed as three pairs of eyes turned towards her.

"Inge Weiss?" Mathias asked.

"The Nazi scientist?" Duncan added.

"The woman I impersonated in Antarctica?" Sally offered.

Sam looked startled. "You were in the Antarctic? When were you in the Antarctic?"

"Last year," Jack realised. "The same mission you were on," he added, pointing at Duncan.

"You knew about this?" Sam demanded.

Jack shrugged. "I knew Gram... _Major_ _O'Neill_ had gone to the Antarctic and someone told me he'd be in danger if Inge went back to the Wewelsberg." He pondered a moment. "There were three graves in that wood," he said. "I take it the third was for _your_ double?" he asked Mathias.

"Graves?" Mathias asked.

Duncan gave a soft cough. "For our doppelgangers," he explained.

"But...they were sent back to England?" Mathias argued.

Duncan shook his head. "That might be what the General told your good lady wife," he allowed, "but the risk was too great."

"Oh, God," Sally moaned.

There was a long moment of silence, broken when Duncan asked. "Why isn't _she_ dead?"

Inge quailed and Jack crossed to stand beside her, reaching out, after only a moment's hesitation, to wrap a protective arm around her shoulder. To his mild surprise – and, if he was honest, his pleasure – she did not lean against him, nor attempt to hide behind his bulk; instead, she drew herself up under his arm and faced her accusers boldly, putting her own arm around his waist to comfort _him_.

"I _see_ ," Duncan drawled in a voice that could have etched his words into plate steel.

"She's okay," Jack insisted, "and she never sprang the trap on your team, despite having the opportunity."

"You're taking this very well," Sam noted, eager to change the subject.

"We've..." Sally began.

"...seen weirder," the three chorused.

Jack shook his head. "So all that crap you told me about: The zombies, the weird aircraft..."

"Zombies?" Duncan asked, nonplussed.

Sam and Sally shared a look and Sam instinctively deferred the right to speak to her grandmother.

"We should avoid talking about the future in any way," Sally said. "Any advance knowledge, even if we _consciously_ tried to avoid acting on it, could have repercussions for future history. We could change the world just by knowing the wrong thing."

"But couldn't that be a good thing?" Duncan asked.

"Butterfly effect," Jack told him unhelpfully.

"Small changes create large consequences," Teal'c expanded; he had heard the explanation often enough in the past years. "If you act to change the life even of a single individual, you change the future, not only for that person but for everyone and everything that their life touches from then on."

"Imagine if you went back in time and somehow stopped Hitler from coming to power," Sam suggested, "only for a worse tyrant to emerge two years later. Or for someone who was actually capable of winning the war to take control."

"Or simply that, by preventing the war, you allow a person to live who then goes on to become a demagogue in another country," Sally added. "History is just too fragile to take the risk. Theoretically, anyway," she admitted.

"It works in practice," Jack assured her.

"So we need to avoid talking about the future," Duncan agreed. "Alright. But what do we do, _now_?"

*

Amy Kawalsky took slow, deep breaths through her respirator. Although the air supply was exhausted, when used as a rebreather the mask both warmed the air she inhaled and took the moisture from that which she _exhaled_ , so that it did not mist in the air before her. She lay in the snow-laden scrub, an StG44 held close against her chest as she endeavoured to keep as still as possible. Two Russian guards stood less than ten feet away and, although she knew that she could take them both even with an antique assault rifle, Amy did not wish to draw attention to herself.

At last, the two men moved away and Amy slipped out of her hiding place. Her locator told her exactly where Tom was, but she hardly needed it. More than the feelings that they shared, the two of them had slipped in and out of time together on more than a dozen occasions. With each passage through the tesseract into the past, a temporal potential accrued in their body tissue. Although on their return journey this potential had always been realised, a quirk of relative temporal velocity meant that a fragment of temporal imbalance always remained. With a single trip, this imbalance would swiftly have dissipated, but for regular travellers, the imbalance built up.

Amy and Tom had gone back and forth often enough that they now carried a permanent imbalance and, because they had travelled together, they carried the _same_ imbalance. Even if the world from which they originated still existed as a shadow of a possibility, they had long since ceased to belong there. Indeed, there was nowhere and nothing and no-one with whom they belonged, except for each other. It would have taken a great deal more distance than lay between them now to break the sense of connection that united these two travellers in time.

Close to the edge of the woods, Amy turned and looked back at the squat bunker. She felt a shiver as she saw the ends of a pair of swinging doors first rise above and then fall behind the roof of the bunker. She could not see much of the roof itself – the bunker stood on a hill that, although low, dominated the surrounding steppe – but she was well-trained and shared with her duplicate in the world that SG-1 knew an insightful and imaginative intelligence. It was not difficult for her to discern that she was watching the opening of the covers of an underground rocket silo.

"Oh, damn," she muttered, lifting a compact field glass to her eye. She ran her magnified gaze over the surface of one of the obelisks. "Oh, damn, damn, damn."

*

Duncan produced a map of the Pfronten area and spread it out, face down, to provide a writing surface. Sam, as precise as ever, produced a ruler and a pencil and made a pretty fair effort at a sketch plan of the outside of the bunker.

"Good draughtsmanship," Sally noted.

Sam grinned at her. "I had a good teacher," she replied.

"Alright," Duncan said. "So we have an unfenced, heavily-patrolled perimeter, a single entrance – also heavily-defended – some of the most substantial bits of concrete I've ever seen and this whole...Egyptian-style thing they've got going on here," he finished, indicating the four obelisks. "Is that likely to be purely decorative?" he asked.

"The Goa'uld are pretty showy," Sam admitted.

Teal'c shook his head, once. "Ahriman is in greatly reduced circumstances," he explained. "She has neither the resources, nor the power to indulge in display."

"There must be..." Jack began.

"...a back way in," Duncan finished.

The two O'Neills locked gazes again.

"Age before beauty," Duncan allowed.

"Ouch," Jack replied. "But I should say a back way _out_. The Goa'uld have a kind of siege claustrophobia," he explained. "No Goa'uld would ever lock herself in anywhere without an escape route, however well-fortified."

Duncan tapped the map. "This ridge would be the obvious place for an escape hatch; out of sight and far enough back to be behind the main line of a siege. But if I were being _really_ sneaky," he added.

Jack nodded. "You'd put the escape hatch in the side of this river channel," he agreed.

"Which would keep you under cover all the way south, as far as Outer Mongolia," Duncan finished.

Sam shook her head. "It's like looking in a particularly weird trick mirror," she told Sally.

"This is actually much stranger than seeing my own granddaughter older than I am," Sally admitted.

"Same age," Sam insisted.

"Uh...yeah."

Jack caught Duncan's eyes and they issued identical short, dry chuckles.

Jack smiled. "One thing I don't get," he noted.

Duncan quirked an eyebrow.

"Why the hell were you such an ornery bastard all those years I was growing up?"

Duncan laughed again. "Probably because I won't be able to forgive you for being younger than me the next time we meet. Anyway, we aren't supposed to be talking about this," he noted.

"Point," Jack agreed.

Sally smiled at Sam, but Sam turned away, feeling suddenly awkward. Her eyes were downcast, but she felt eyes on her, looked up and met the gaze of Mathias Jackson.

"Something on your mind?" he asked kindly.

Sam shot a worried glance back at her grandmother, but Sally had been distracted by a question from Duncan O'Neill, who clearly relied on her in the same role that Sam fulfilled in Jack's team. She looked back at Mathias and saw, behind the same unselfish concern that distinguished Daniel, a hard and worldly edge. It was strange to see a man who was so like her friend and yet quite different.

"It's nothing," she demurred. "Well; nothing I can talk about," she corrected. She felt a flush on the back of her neck. She might have been able to admit to Mathias that she was fighting the urge to tell Sally that her daughter-in-law might die in a tragic accident, but that would come too close to making the same confession regarding the fate of Mathias' own son. It was hard to face these two people, knowing the losses that she would one day share with them.

 

"Have you ever considered a career in banditry?"

Lotte gave a sharp laugh. "You mean gun-running?" she asked disdainfully.

"That is only a sideline," Rasputin assured her. "Our real interests are in horses; breeding, racing, stealing..."

"Wounding?"

Rasputin looked shocked. "Never! Well, only the ones that really look like beating ours in a race."

"Lotte!" Tom called. "Don't chat to the prisoners."

"He's quite safe," Lotte called back. "I know how to secure a prisoner."

"I can confirm that," Rasputin added. "I have been tied less securely by professionals."

"Were these the sort of professionals that someone else paid to tie you up, or that you paid?" Tom asked.

"The question was blurred," Rasputin admitted.

"You have lived an interesting life, Nicolai Tevyavich," Lotte observed.

"I am a Bandit Khan," he replied, and then he gave vent to a short burst of song, informing them that it was, it was a glorious thing to be a Bandit Khan.

"Khan doesn't rhyme with thing," Tom pointed out.

"Nor does orphan boy, but I'm that as well."

"My heart bleeds," Tom assured him, shoving a gag into his mouth. "Do you have any idea what he's talking about?" he asked Lotte, drawing a slew of muffled invective from Rasputin.

Lotte reached down and tugged loose the gag.

"Gilbert and Sullivan, you philistine!" the Bandit Khan spat.

Tom snatched the gag from Lotte and replaced it. "Never heard of them," he muttered. "Come on, Lotte. Let's go and see what the plan is."

Lotte gave a small smile. "You want to see if your woman is back?"

"She is not my woman," Tom replied, but he too smiled.

Lotte watched his back as he walked ahead of her, slowly realising that she would not ordinarily have recognised the need in Tom Keeler. For years she had been blind to tenderness, oblivious to gentle feelings. Her world had turned grey on the day that her family were slaughtered; of late, colour had been creeping back to her sight, but now, with a shocking suddenness, everything seemed bright and vivid.

She paused for a moment and Tom turned to face her. "Are you alright?" he asked.

"I...I think so."

His face split in a broad grin.

"What?" Lotte demanded.

Tom turned and walked away.

"What?"

*

_2001_

"Smith wouldn't tell us what this was all about," Djerovich noted, fingering the chain that wrapped around his ankle, tucked down inside his boot and emerged through a hole in the seam of the heel. "Were you planning to be any more forthcoming?"

"I wish I could," Markova replied, "but there are...forces at work here. The chain is essential if we are to mount a successful operation."

"And what is our operation to be?" Djerovich asked.

"The Rasputins will attack the front of the bunker and draw attention, while you and I, together with Mr Smith and Agent Karpova, go in the back entrance and take out the processing machinery."

"That's a very...full-fledged plan." Djerovich narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "You seem to be three or four steps ahead of me here, Svetlana Alexandrovna."

Markova stood still for a moment and then nodded once. "Alright," she said. "I apologise; this is all rather overwhelming for me as well. It..." She put a hand on his arm and drew him to one side. She was not at all surprised that Karpova followed them; the young woman had been fidgety since her boss had left on his scouting run. Markova recognised the telltale signs of a deep-rooted loyalty and so she made no protest.

"So?" Djerovich asked.

Markova sighed. "It seems that our actions here have been planned out in advance; well in advance. Our strategy was laid out to Rasputin at his father's feet."

"That's ludicrous," Karpova snarled.

"Maybe," Markova agreed, "but how else could Rasputin have shown up just as we need him, with a rattle-bag armoured division that he spent fifteen years putting together?"

Karpova squared her shoulders under her parka. "Maybe you're not telling us everything," she suggested. "Maybe you knew a lot more than you were letting on from the very start."

"Then why would I bring you with me?" Markova asked.

"Legitimacy," Karpova replied. "We put an FSB rubber stamp on the whole business; the SD has no jurisdiction outside its own laboratories."

Markova shrugged. "It makes little difference to me whether you believe me or not. _I_ trust the information I have been given and we must see it through, with or without you. I'd rather it were with you," she added.

"Why?" Karpova demanded.

With a sigh, Markova retrieved an age-yellowed sheet of paper from inside her jacket. "Because," she explained, unfolding the paper and passing a single sheet to Karpova, "your names are specifically mentioned in the plan."

*

_1944_

Mariana left Daniel sleeping on the couch, or rather, left him lying there, pretending to be asleep. Whether she was in fact fooled, or whether she simply did not care, Daniel could not tell, but the important thing was that he was alone. With a silent thought of thanks to Jack and Sam and Teal'c for years of informal training, he stole quietly to the door and inserted a length of wire into the lock.

 

Magda had just put Lisl down to sleep for the night when her door opened.

"Daniel," she said with a smile.

"Are you alright, Magda?" he asked.

"Of course," she replied.

"Good. I'm going to get you out of here."

Magda's brow furrowed in confusion. "Why?" she asked.

Daniel sighed. "Mariana is dangerous," he told the girl.

"She's lovely," Magda protested. "She's been so kind to us and...and she likes you," she added shyly. "The four of us could be..."

"No." Daniel shivered in horror at the thought. He crouched down beside her and laid his hands on her arms. "Magda, Mariana is a terrible person; a killer. I know that she seems kind to you, but she's a brutal murderer and she'll get bored of being nice to you and then she'll hurt you. I can't leave you here."

"But..."

"She's planning something terrible, Magda," Daniel insisted. "I have to stop her, but I can't leave you with her. You must get ready to travel and bundle Lisl up warmly."

"But..."

"Do you trust me, Magda?"

"Of course," she replied.

"Then just do as I say, please. I'll be back soon."

*

Tom looked up, his eyes wide and his face flushed. "She's here!" he gasped, delighted.

A moment later the door opened and Amy entered, grinning broadly as she flung herself into Tom's embrace. Only when she pulled away from him did she notice the crowd staring at them.

"Either I'm seeing double or things have got more complicated. Again."

Almost giddy with relief at seeing her safe, Tom made the introductions. Amy greeted the newcomers, who were surprised to learn that she was the daughter of Max Kawalsky.

"What?" Sally asked. "Little Max?"

"Little?" Amy was taken aback.

"Well, he is only ten," Tom reminded her.

Amy laughed at that, but soon grew sober. "We have a problem," she said.

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Another one?"

"That bunker, Ahriman's stronghold, is a launch site," she explained. "She's going to launch a weapon of some kind and from the size of the accelerator rails...Well, I can't even guess what it could do, but I'm certain that it won't be pretty."

Duncan nodded. "So we get Sally..."

"...and Carter," Jack added.

"...into that bunker to look at this weapon," Duncan finished. "How long do you think you might need?"

Sally shrugged. "I can't say," she admitted.

"At least an hour," Sam added. "I know Goa'uld technology, which should help."

Jack frowned. "We couldn't count on going undetected that long; not somewhere as important as the weapon site."

"We would need a diversion," Teal'c agreed. "Perhaps if Amy Kawalsky, Tom Keeler and I were to launch an attack on the perimeter to draw off the guards..."

"Too many guards," Amy assured him.

Jack and Duncan gave identical nods. "And the area..." they said together.

"After you," Jack insisted.

"Age before beauty," Duncan replied.

Jack glowered, but continued nonetheless. "The area at the front of the bunker is too open for a small force to make a surgical strike. We would need at least ten more soldiers to cover that area properly without leaving each man – or woman – a sitting duck." He looked at his grandfather. "You didn't bring any more bodies with you?"

"An even dozen," Duncan assured him.

"Unfortunately, we left them in Bavaria," Mathias added.

"I know where we could get some fighters," Lotte offered.

 

Nicolai Tevyavich Rasputin sat in a chair in front of the fire and stared at his captors. "You need my help?" he asked incredulously. "You may have noticed that my men aren't quite up to your standards."

"But you have numbers and you know the land," Jack insisted.

Nicolai shrugged. "I won't argue that, so let's talk about the real issue: what's in it for my people? I mean, I don't want to come across as mercenary, but I am a bandit, not a patriot. I have bills to pay and mouths to feed. Why should I help you?"

"Please, Nicolai Tevyavich," Lotte said. "We need you."

"What's in it for you?" Duncan asked, rhetorically, his voice filled with undisguised distaste.

Jack stepped forward, cutting his grandfather off before he could launch into a stream of vitriol. "The Nazis who have come to this bunker are not like any Nazis you have encountered before," he explained.

"Yes; aliens, you said."

"Never mind that," Jack snapped. "Look: they are scientists and weapons designers and what they are building in there will make an H-bomb look like a firecracker!"

"What is ‘H-bomb'?" Rasputin asked.

Jack closed his eyes, forcing himself to be patient. "A very big bomb, but not as big as this one will be. You say you've got mouths to feed? Well, not if this thing goes up you won't. You want to know what's in it for you? Survival. If you don't help us, you can kiss the Earth goodbye."

"It sounds very Biblical."

"It's deadly serious," Jack assured him.

"Well yes, I can see that you believe it," Rasputin assured him. "You practically ooze sincerity, but that is my problem."

"You'd rather I was glib?" Jack asked.

Rasputin shrugged as best he could while tied to a chair. "I do not trust sincerity," he explained. "You believe, fervently, in something and that sort of thing leads to unhealthy conditions such as commitment and dedication. People who believe they are right will do anything; tell any lie to achieve their goals. The only reason I believe a word you say is that your story is so laughable I can not consider that you would have made it up."

Jack gave a frustrated snarl.

"What can we do to convince you?" Mathias asked.

"You? Nothing," Rasputin replied. He turned and winked at Lotte. "But you had me with ‘please'."

Lotte was taken aback. "I do not understand."

"You are not a woman who begs. I will help you; I give you my word as Bandit Khan."

"Oh, well in that case..." Duncan snorted.

Mathias looked at Rasputin and nodded, slowly. "He means it," he said. "Come on; anyone who insists on being the Bandit Khan _must_ care enough about image to keep his word once he's given it."

"You are a wise man," Rasputin told him.

Teal'c walked over and crouched beside Rasputin's chair. He looked into his eyes for a long moment and then nodded, once. "He speaks the truth," he said firmly.

"And you are a scary man. Now, if someone could release my arms?"

There was a moment's pause and then Lotte was at his side and the ropes fell away from his wrists and ankles. Rasputin rose and tottered unsteadily on blood-starved legs. Lotte instinctively put out a hand to steady him. He smiled at her, and once more she blushed and turned away.

"Alright," he said, looking to Jack and Duncan. "How about one of the Brothers Grim fills me in on what my people have to do, while the rest of you untie my bandits?"

*

Daniel had bearded enough Goa'uld despots in their dens that he was not easily overawed by scale, but the sheer emptiness of the main chamber of Ahriman's bunker left him breathless. The ceiling, with its huge sliding doors, loomed above him; the floor lay more than a dozen yards below him. Every step he took on the steel gantry rang out through the cavernous space like the chiming of a gong and he was sure that at any moment he would be surrounded by guards.

In the centre of the chamber, the Vergeltungwaffe Entsheidende towered up like a church steeple, vast, sleek and deadly. Perhaps it was his imagination, or perhaps it as stray emanations from the Dahak tesseract, but the rocket seemed to radiate dread. It was closer in size to a manned rocket than the ballistic missiles that Daniel was familiar with – or at least aware of – but it was unmistakably a weapon of massive destructive potential.

Daniel's plan was straightforward; Jack would have loved it. He had seen how to close the Casket in Mariana's lab at Castle Falkenstein and he planned to do just that. Then he would try to find a way to launch the rocket into space, setting it on a course away from Earth. If he was able to return to his own time, he could borrow a ship from the Tok'ra or the Jaffa to find and find a more permanent way to dispose of the Casket; if he was not, he could leave a note for General Hammond. The plan lacked detail, of course, but he could improvise those as he went along.

As he had told Mariana, he was good at improvising.

Daniel crept closer to the rocket. His hands trembled from the influence of the Dahak field as he reached for the lock on the outer hatch.

"Stop!"

*

_2001_

Smith opened the inner door of the passageway once more and let Markova's team through. "Dr Markova; Lieutenant Karpova," he greeted them. "You have chains on your boots?"

"As instructed," Markova confirmed.

"I'm not even going to ask you how you know my name," Karpova informed him, primly. "I really don't care." She went past him into the tunnel, followed by their back up, two border guards with RPK-74 light machine guns.

"Then you're more stoic than I am," he noted. "Now, I can take you through to the altar chamber, but do you have a distraction arranged?"

"You don't know?" Markova asked.

"Apparently I won't want to."

Karpova frowned. "What?"

The still calm of the clear, Siberian air was shattered by a thunderous crump from the front of the bunker.

"What the hell was that?" Smith demanded.

"A tank," Karpova drawled.

"Our distraction," Djerovich added.

"You brought a tank? Why the hell did you bring a tank?"

Another blast was followed by the rattle of automatic weapon fire.

"You know how it is," Karpova sighed. "You wonder if you should, but you know you'd feel like such an idiot if you needed one and you'd left it at home."

 

Smith led the team down into the subbasement and the processing lab. Snow lilies lay around the room on benches, some intact, others pulped; still others ground and refined over Bunsen flames into the pale-green powder that Djerovich had been shown upstairs. There were no guards – they had all gone to the front of the bunker to fight off the assault of the ‘last of the Golden Hordes' – and the scientists were huddled under desks.

Markova picked up one of the snow lilies. It had delicate, dark purple petals, shot through with silver-white streaks. Dark speckles peppered the base of each petal and long, golden stamens rose from the trumpet. It had a sweet, musky perfume that tingled excitingly in her nostrils.

"It's lovely," she murmured. "Who would have thought that something so beautiful could cause such violence."

Karpova snorted cynically. "You never read the Iliad then?"

"I don't think that it's the flower," Smith noted. "It's that _thing_ upstairs that causes the violence. Anyway, we'd best stop dilly-dallying and hurry this on. I'll lock the lab coats safely away while you set the charges."

*

_1944_

Lotte gazed out of the window and slid her knife across the surface of a whetstone. It was habit for her to keep her blades as sharp as possible, but in this instance she was simply trying to distract herself from troubling thoughts.

"I think that must be sharp enough to cut a commissar's heartstrings by now."

Lotte started; the paper-thin edge of her knife sliced into the pad of her thumb and she winced.

Nicolai hurried forward and took her hand, holding a clean handkerchief to the cut. "I am sorry," he said. "I did not mean to..."

"It's alright," Lotte assured him. She waved her hand airily, the carefree gesture acquiring a darker overtone from the razor-sharp blade that she held. She blushed and slid the knife into the sheath concealed underneath the folds of her skirt.

Nicolai smiled. "How many of those do you have hidden under there?"

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"Only if I can check for myself," he replied fixing her with a glittering gaze.

Lotte flushed and looked away. "You shouldn't...It isn't safe," she said.

Nicolai tied off the handkerchief. "Of course it isn't," he agreed, but he lifted his fingers to brush against her scarred cheek. "It never is."

"No," she replied, drawing away from him. "Since I was scarred, I've killed every man who touched me. Most of them deserved it, but there was one boy who...He never showed me anything but kindness and I cut him down. I...I had to."

"I'm prepared to take that risk," Nicolai assured her. He took her arm as she tried to move away again. "If you want me to leave you alone, you don't need any knives, but don't worry about me."

"Herr Rasputin..."

"I want you to be my Khadun," he pressed.

"Khadun?"

"My bandit queen."

"Herr Rasputin..."

"And even if you feel you must refuse me, I should like you to call me Kolenka, not Herr Rasputin."

"I am afraid for you."

"Don't be."

*

Daniel looked around and saw a slim, dark-haired young woman standing on the gantry not far from him. Despite the cold of the steel gantry, she was barefoot; a pair of boots hung loosely in one delicate hand and a Luger was gripped firmly in the other.

"Why stop?" he asked, although the Luger might have been reason enough.

"Because the Dahak Casket is open inside that resonating chamber and the power will be building. If you open the hatch, you'll be gripped by the fury and I'll probably have to kill you."

"You seem to know a lot about it," Daniel noted.

"I should do. I've been fighting Ahriman for a very long time."

"And yet you look so young. What's your secret?"

The girl cocked her head to one side. "Not what you think," she replied. "Not quite, anyway. But I do know a lot about the Dahak Casket, including how to avoid its effects. The power radiates in all directions, but is quickly absorbed by metal and stone. This gantry seems to have been designed to dissipate the energies, but the rubber in your boots will insulate you. The Dahak rage will build up in your body and..."

"You'll have to kill me," Daniel finished.

"And please don't think for a moment that I couldn't."

"Well, if nothing else I think that the pistol confirms that. So, what do we do now?"

"You hold the railing; I'll open the hatch and close the Casket. After that, we can try to find some way of disposing of it."

Daniel took a sound hold on the railing. "Well, if we can find a way of locking the rocket's controls so that the engines keep firing until they run out of fuel, then it will just shoot off into space, out of harm's way."

"It's not ideal," the girl admitted, as she reached for the hatch, "but..."

A shot rang out through the cavernous space. Blood splattered across the warhead's casing and the girl snatched her hand against her chest, blood pumping freely from her wounded palm. Floodlights flickered into life around the edges of the rocket chamber.

"It is certainly _far_ from ideal," Veidt declared, stalking along the gantry towards them.

At her mistress' shoulder, Frau Zelig held a smoking rifle in a firing position. Although she had just shot the girl, the barrel of the rifle now pointed squarely between Daniel's eyes, almost daring him to move. Daniel knew that very little could give Iblis more pleasure than for him to give her an excuse to fire and so he kept very, very still.

"Now, here is a dismaying sight," Veidt went on. "To find my beloved Dr Jackson consorting with another woman. And who does _she_ prove to be but my treacherous, ungrateful brother."

"Brother?" Daniel asked, confused, but the girl was utterly ignoring him now.

"Ahriman," she hissed.

"Ormazdh," Veidt replied. "Or should I call you Gretel? Well, no matter; your attempt to stop me has failed and we shall have plenty of time to become reacquainted. And I am sure that Iblis must be pleased to see you again."

Gretel groaned in pain. "She always had a strange way of showing her pleasure."

"I owed you that for the Wewelsberg," Zelig spat. "Both of you." The rifle twitched in her hands.

Veidt lay a hand on the barrel of the weapon and pushed it down. "It is fortunate that I was warned of Dr Jackson's intentions," she continued. It did not escape Daniel's attention that Zelig's eyes flashed in triumph to hear that her mistress had abandoned the use of his first name. "Come, my dear one; let Dr Jackson see the meaning of loyalty."

Daniel watched with rising horror as a small figure appeared at Veidt's side.

"I'm sorry, Daniel," Magda said, "but...it will be alright."

Veidt smiled beatifically and laid a loving hand on Magda's head. "You see, Daniel? My little protégé is faithful to us both and wiser by far than you."

Zelig's face twisted in apoplectic rage. "Protégé!" she spat.

"Take them away!" Veidt commanded tersely. "I think that Daniel should go to the cells this time; no luxuries whatsoever. Let him contemplate the price of treachery for a while."

A cruel sneer replaced that rictus of fury. "As you wish, Imperiatrix," she hissed.

*

From a wooded hill that was the closest real cover to the bunker, Jack regarded the looming structure. "Well, I've been on stranger mission," he admitted, "but never with a stranger force on my six."

Duncan shrugged. "A few dozen Siberian bandits, your own grandparents and two assassins from the future. What's so odd about that?"

"They're from an alternate future," Jack reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. Okay, that's a little weird. Everyone clear what they're doing?" he asked, focusing on what he could control so as not to dwell on the bizarre.

"Sound off!" Jack snapped, asserting his seniority.

"Team one is Teal'c, Kawalsky, Weiss, Leman and I," Sam replied. "Team one will take Kawalsky's exit route through the perimeter and the garage and so infiltrate the rocket hall inside the bunker. We will locate the rocket and disable it."

"Team two is the Cataclysm team and Keeler." Duncan still sounded both resentful of Jack's superiority and slightly dubious of his claimed rank. "Team two will locate the rear exit of the bunker, enter the complex, locate the cells and release Dr Daniel Jackson. Then Team two will join Team one in the rocket hall. Why do we do jailbreak duty?" he demanded.

"We went through this," Jack reminded him. "Because _my_ team know the most about Goa'uld technology. Team three?"

"That is my bandits," Rasputin confirmed. "We create diversion by attacking the main gate. If possible we take control of the gate, but main thing is to get attention of those inside." He grinned maniacally. "We make _big_ noise!"

Lotte took a step forward. " _We_ make big noise," she echoed. "I'll help to get Team one into the bunker, but then I'm for the front gate. I'll get the bandits in or get out and join them."

Sam shook her head. "You're not a one-woman army, Lotte," she warned. "The gate will be heavily defended."

"Yes," Lotte agreed, "but they'll be looking forwards and I'll be behind them. That's a strong gate and if the bandits get hung up there then the rest of the perimeter guard can wrap around and flank them. They'll be cut to pieces." She turned her scarred face and bland stare towards Jack. "And you know it."

Jack did not even blush. Duncan looked unsurprised by the revelation, but it was clearly news to the rest of the group.

"Of course," Rasputin added. "It is obvious. My people know the danger and we have accepted it."

Lotte turned towards him. "Then why agree?"

"Because you asked," Rasputin repeated. "And because we have families. Our kin have been away from the bloodshed, but this Veidt plans to bring war to the heart of our land. We will not allow this."

Jack shook his head. "You're a funny kind of unpatriotic bandit," he noted.

"What is patriotism?" Rasputin demanded. "I do not love my country; my country is a mess of cold stone and political strife. There is nothing to love about my country, but I my family are flesh and blood and I love them. You will have your diversion," he assured them.

"Damnit," Jack grumbled. "Alright, Rasputin; Leman and I will take out the garrison."

"Sir?" Sam asked, uncertainly.

"Least we can do."

Rasputin bowed his head in grave respect. "Thank you, Colonel. You should get on your way; my bandits will be in position."

 

The two teams slipped along the edge of the plain. Team one stopped at the gully through which Amy had escaped from the bunker perimeter, while Team two when on towards the rear of the complex. Sam and Teal'c crouched together; Amy was a dozen yards in front of them and the rest of the team as far behind.

"You seem uneasy, Major Carter," Teal'c noted.

"I don't like working with other people," Sam admitted. "I feel comfortable with _my_ team around me; I'm not so happy with this particular Brigade of the Bizarre on side."

"But our team is here."

Sam shook her head slowly. "You know, it wouldn't kill you to let a spurious rationalisation slide from time to time," she told him.

Teal'c just looked at her.

"I don't suppose that you'd believe that I was worrying about Daniel? About the bandits?"

Teal'c raised an eyebrow.

Sam sighed. "What happens when we get in there?" she asked. "When we reach the Casket...The Dahak tesseract isn't just the enemy, it's our way home," she explained. "But I have no idea how to send us safely through it. The Colonel hasn't said anything, but I know he's assuming that I'll just wave my hand and open a magic door back to our own time."

"And can you not?"

"Teal'c!"

"I mean, can you not create a return portal? Was this not the purpose of your work these past years?"

"Yes," Sam admitted, "but it's all theory and even my best guess would require a whole lot of things that I simply don't have access to if I were to begin to make it work. Like an assistant in the future for starters."

"Perhaps Inge Weiss will be able to find a way," Teal'c suggested.

"Oh, thank you," Sam drawled. "That really helps."

"You still do not trust her?"

"I trust her if the Colonel trusts her," Sam grudgingly allowed.

"You disapprove of her relationship with O'Neill then?"

"No," Sam replied. She almost sounded surprised. "It's just that..." she paused for a long moment. "I don't like people who are smarter than I am! It's not a matter of jealousy," she added hastily. "I'm not used to being left baffled; it confuses me. And put that eyebrow down, I know very well I'm talking in circles."

"I understand, Major Carter," Teal'c assured her. "It is hard to accept that you are not unparalleled. I felt the same when I first encountered the Tau'ri and learned that there were those who were stronger than the Jaffa."

Sam shrugged. "I just feel I may be learning a great many valuable lessons on this little journey through time and I have to admit that I don't like it."

To the west, a rattle of gunfire broke through the cold night air; the diversionary assault had begun. Amy rose to her feet and moved forward in a crouch, her assault rifle held at the ready. Sam could not help noticing that she did not move as the Amy Kawalsky that she knew and Daniel Jackson, in his way, loved; it would have been the creepiest thing that she had ever seen, if she had not met her own un-double three years earlier.

Sam nodded. "Let's go home, Teal'c," she said.

*

_2001_

The altar chamber was quiet; the procession had stopped and the crucible bearers stood listlessly, weighted down at heavy chains which bound them to the railings around the edge of the chamber. Half-a-dozen guards stood around the edges of the chamber, watching the approaches, and another half-a-dozen stood on the observation gantries. In comparison to the enervated bearers, the guards looked wired to the eyes, the barrels of their weapons twitching in their shaking hands.

As she emerged from the shadows and dropped the nearest guard, Karpova was aware that her own hands were trembling. She was seized by a fierce joy as the guard fell to the gantry, bleeding freely but still trying to force himself into a firing position. She fired three more times into the twitching body, before a searing pain in her ankle caused her to cry out. Karpova stumbled and the return fire shot over her head.  Down below, the border guards opened up with their light machine guns and the report of Rasputina's Dragunov rang out several time, each crack coinciding with the fall of a guard. It was over in seconds.

Partly because she had seen how resilient her first man had been and partly because of the inexplicable fury that pressed in around the edges of her consciousness, Karpova rose and stalked cautiously around the gantry as the rest of the team moved into the altar centre proper. She winced in pain as she put her right foot down. Crouching, she felt the chain; it was almost red hot.

Markova approached the altar.

"For God's sake, don't touch the light," Smith warned.

"Why not?" Djerovich asked.

"I don't know precisely. Just...believe me when I say that it would be bad," the Englishman replied.

"It's alright," Markova assured them. "I know what I'm doing...I hope." She approached and, with painstaking care, touched the surface of the crystalline coffin. She slid her fingers in halting, yet precise patterns across the crystal. After a moment, the lid slid closed, shutting out all but a trickle of the unlight.

On the gantry, Karpova saw one of the guards struggling towards the edge of the gantry. She levelled her pistol, but at that moment the sides of the coffin met with a sharp click; the man spasmed and lay still, as though suddenly realising that he could not possibly survive with his wounds. The chain on Karpova's ankle cooled.

Djerovich turned to Markova. "How did you know what to do?" he asked. "The letter again?"

Markova nodded. "Now we find out how reliable that information is." She took out her radio and reset the frequency.

*

_1944_

The rattle of gunfire did not penetrate far into the bowels of the concrete bunker, but when one of the bandits fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the gatehouse, the sound of the explosion rolled down into the corridors.

Daniel and Gretel were being escorted by four guards. All four looked around at the distant thunder of the grenade strike. Without a moment's hesitation, Gretel drove her fingers into the throat of the nearest man and then grappled with a second. Daniel threw himself at a third guard who tried to bring his submachine gun to bear, slamming him against the wall.

The fourth guard got his arm around Daniel's neck from behind, but Daniel bucked backwards while his attacker was still off balance. With some effort, managed to bring his feet up to the wall and kick out. The breath blasted from the guard's chest in a might whoosh as Daniel crushed him to the opposite side of the corridor and his arms lost their strength.

"Get down!" Gretel called. Daniel did so, but the disoriented guards just stood baffled as the girl raked the corridor with bullets.

As they fell, Gretel turned to Daniel and found herself facing the muzzle of another MP40.

"Dr Jackson?"

"You know an awful lot about alien technology, you're extremely ruthless and surprisingly strong for such a petite girl," Daniel noted. "I think I can make a shrewd guess how you maintain your youthful complexion."

"I doubt it," Gretel replied.

*

Rasputin stared at the point where his grenade had struck and felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. "That really should have done _some_ damage," he protested.

"Concrete is difficult to destroy with explosions," his lieutenant noted.

"Thank you, Marius," Rasputin sighed. "I hadn't noticed."

Rifle fire broke out from the gatehouse and one of the bandits fell.

"To horse!" Rasputin ordered.

"We fall back?" Marius asked.

"We're outgunned from a protected position," Rasputin replied. "If we fall back, they'll cut us down. We get close under their gunports and see what we can do from there."

"You're mad!"

"Not mad," Rasputin replied. "Crazy, perhaps, but not mad. Now move!"

*

Amy led the way into the loading bay. The heavy doors were open, but thick steel shutters had closed down over the inner doors.

"I don't suppose you have any explosives left?" Jack asked Sam.

"Not so much," Sam admitted.

Amy slung her carbine and took a small tube from one of her leg packs. "I've got this," she told them.

"What is it?" Jack asked.

"Thermite paste."

"You're very well-equipped," Sam noted.

"We like to be prepared." Amy uncapped the tube and squeezed out a line of silver-white paste around the outside of the shutter. She replaced the cap, returned the tube to her pack and took out a slim, silver detonator. "Now, stand back and make sure you don't look directly at the door when I set this off," she warned as she pushed the tip of the detonator into the paste.

The team did so. They felt the wash of heat as Amy triggered the detonator, then heard the dull thud of the shutter falling outwards.

"I'm going to miss my toys when they run out," Amy sighed.

"Look on the bright side," Jack advised. "You may die this afternoon."

"Yay."

Jack turned to Sam. "Carter; Team one is yours. Good hunting. Lotte, with me."

 

"Paydirt!" Duncan crowed. "One escape hatch, as advertised."

"Ah...Duncan?" Sally asked.

"Yes?"

"Not to be a nag, but how do we open it? There's no handle."

Duncan looked crestfallen. "I was kind of hoping you could cover that angle."

The Cataclysm team had made their way along the half-concealed gully behind the bunker until they came to the door; it was almost exactly where Duncan and his grandson had predicted, but unfortunately was indeed no more than a sheet of steel from this side.

"That's my cue," Tom assured them, stepping forward and brandishing his tube of thermite paste.

Mathias looked unconvinced. "You're going to brush your teeth at it?" he asked.

Tom sighed. "Just stand back and hold this," he said, thrusting a metal canister into Mathias' hands."

"What is it?"

"A fire extinguisher," Tom replied. "This gully is full of vegetable matter and things are going to get a little warm."

*

"You are right that I am a Goa'uld," Gretel admitted, "but you do not understand. You do not know who I..."

"You're Spenta Mainyu," Daniel told her. "I should have guessed it earlier, but Ahriman calling you her brother brought it all into place. You're the holy spirit, child of Ahura Mazda who stands between the Earth and Ahriman."

Gretel blushed. "I usually just go by Ormazdh these days," she admitted. "Or more recently Gretel. Spenta Mainyu was a name I earned...oh, so long ago. So many names," she sighed. "So many faces."

"Thraetona, for example?"

"Oh, no," Gretel laughed. "Thraetona was one far greater than I. Greater than any Goa'uld; greater even than the Ancients. It was Thraetona who first bound the Dahak entity and so made life possible within a linear universe of time and space. Thraetona's power was as far beyond my comprehension as mine is beyond the plankton of the seas.

"But I bore a dozen names as Sokar's enforcer and a dozen more as his enemy, when I devoted myself to protecting those he would destroy. Since my mind first became meshed with that of one of my hosts I have always preferred to use _their_ names instead of my own."

"Then you share your host's body, like a Tok'ra does?"

Gretel shook her head. "When the priestess Ahla almost achieved my destruction, both of us almost died. We survived by becoming one with each other in all ways; a single mind, preserving aspects of both parties: Ormazdh's knowledge, skill and ruthlessness; Ahla's compassion and desire to protect. As death came for the body of Ahla, I...we fled to another, not knowing what would happen. What we found was that Ahla stayed with Ormazdh, but our new host once more became one with us. Each time the symbiote body has been forced to move to a new host, something has been lost, but more has been gained.

"I am everyone that I have ever been, Daniel Jackson. I am Ormazdh and Ahla, Ballis and Nateriu. I am Simeon and Godeca, Nyima and Lam. I have belonged to a hundred races and a hundred families and each of those lives has stayed with me. Always I have striven to end the threat posed by Ahriman and Dahak, but although I have thwarted my brother's lust for destruction a thousand times, always he escapes me, often by abusing my foolish mercy, either towards him or towards his viper, Iblis."

"Why should I believe you?" Daniel asked.

"Because you have no choice," she replied. "The Casket can never be kept safe on Earth and there is no other in this day and age who could take it beyond this sphere. I have tried hiding it away," she added, "but there is nowhere now that people will not go. I had thought that it would be safe in Tibet, protected by an order of Buddhist monks who used meditation and ceaseless chanting to still its insatiable rage. But then the Nazis came and Iblis with them. He massacred my brothers in front of the Casket and with his murderous frenzy reawakened its own bloodlust. I returned from a pilgrimage to find the monastery and the order that I had built through a hundred generations destroyed," she added in a choked voice. "I knew then what I had feared always; that this business could never end while Ahriman still lives...and he will not die while _I_ still live."

"That's a bleak way of looking at it."

Gretel shrugged. "Not really. You see, I know that I am dying. I have grown weaker over the past millennium as the naquadah has faded from my system, tiny doses remaining in each of my host bodies. I am no longer the Spenta Mainyu that so many prayed to for protection. Already my ability to utilise Goa'uld technology has faded and soon I shall be too weak to even heal my host body at much more than an ordinary human rate. Already I fear I am no match for Ahriman, but I must oppose him and I must send Dahak from your world. Will you please let me help you?"

Daniel looked into her eyes for a long moment. He lowered the MP40 and Gretel helped him to his feet.

"Thank you," she said.

"Never mind the thanks," Daniel replied. "Let's do what needs to be done."

*

"How many guards?" Teal'c asked.

"About a dozen," Sam replied. She lowered the periscope and turned to her team. "They're watching that gantry like hawks. I don't know the weapons they're armed with, but they look like a fusion of Goa'uld and Earth technology; probably some sort of primitive plasma rifle or blaster. With the advantage of position they could cut us down in seconds if we tried to rush them and get to the rocket itself."

"We can't just give up," Inge protested.

Sam shot the scientist a superior glance. "I never suggested we should," she assured her. "What we're going to do is bypass the rocket and go around the outside of the chamber to the control room on the far side."

"How dangerous is this rocket?" Inge asked. "The most advanced V-weapon projects are not very accurate and with the size of this thing..."

Sam shook her head. "Can't count on it. If they've taken the time to give their élite guards energy weapons, Ahriman and Iblis will have used their knowledge of Goa'uld technology to create the advanced guidance systems that their rocket will require. Chances are this thing could pinpoint a single individual from apogee and self-correct to land on his head, but all of the information will have to be fed in from the control room and I know enough about Goa'uld technology to sabotage the launch from there. Just follow me around the outer perimeter and we'll be done."

Sam's radio hissed. " _Sierra Golf One do you copy?_ "

Sam muttered a curse as she snatched up the device. "We're supposed to be a radio silence," she hissed, before the full impact of what she had just heard occurred to her. It had been a woman's voice; a Russian woman. How could a Russian woman be calling her via a twenty-first century field radio? "Who is this?"

" _This is Dr Svetlana Markova,_ " the voice replied. " _I heard that you could use a hand_."

"Major Carter."

Sam looked up at Teal'c's warning. A group of guards were making their way from the gantry towards Team one's position, clearly alerted by the noise of the communicator.

"Hold that thought," Sam whispered. "We have a few things to deal with first."

*

_2001_

"Wait, Major!" Markova called, urgently. "We are at the Casket and have closed the main seals, but we don't know what to do next."

There was a long pause.

"Major Carter?"

" _Sorry_ ," Carter replied. " _Look, we really are a little busy here. You'll have to stand by_."

Markova muttered a swear word under her breath.

"Excuse me," Smith said.

"Yes," Markova sighed. "I don't suppose that you know what we need to do next?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Smith replied smugly.

"What?"

Smith reached under his coveralls and brought out a battered envelope. "I had a letter," he explained. "From myself."

*

_1944_

"Are you sure we're heading the right way?" Daniel asked.

Gretel opened a door. At once she slammed it shut and ducked back as the heavy wood splintered. "I'm pretty sure," she said.

"Any chance of getting through?"

Gretel shook her head. "There's at least half a dozen, it's a narrow passage and they'll know we're coming when the door opens."

"Is there another way round?"

"How should I know?" Gretel demanded. "I've been around for a long time, but not around _here_."

Daniel sighed. "I'm sorry."

"So am I. Unless we can find another way around or some miracle occurs, Ahriman will launch her rocket and...Well, you and I will want to find a nice spot to hole up in the basement of this bunker, because there won't be much left of the wider world."

Daniel shrugged. "If that launch goes to plan, I'll probably never have been born. At least I won't have any worries."

"Well...that'll make hiding in the basement a lot less fun." Despite her flirtatious tone, Gretel sounded uncertain and uncomfortable, as though uncertainty was not a familiar state for her. Daniel could not easily empathise.

Beyond the door, a firefight broke out.

"Maybe we have our miracle," Gretel suggested.

"I'm sure a god shouldn't sound so surprised by that."

"You get the door and I'll go first. On three."

There was a scream from the far side of the door.

"Three!" Gretel snapped.

Daniel threw the door open and Gretel dived through it, rolling nimbly into a crouch and firing three quick bursts from the MP40. By the time Daniel followed, the corridor was full of bodies.

"Clear!" a voice called.

Daniel felt himself relax at the sound of that voice. "Jack?" he called out.

"No!"

"Is that serious or are you just messing around?"

"Yes and no!" A man with dark hair appeared in the corridor, followed by a blonde woman and...

"Oh," Daniel said.

"You must be Daniel," Mathias said. "I guess you know me well enough."

"Ah, yes," Daniel agreed, almost choking on the lie. He had never met his grandfather, but he knew full well that he couldn't tell him that.

"So," the man who wasn't Jack said. "Shall we go find a rocket?"

*

Jack couldn't help but be impressed by Lotte. Impressed and a little bit disturbed. She moved like a shadow and killed as easily as she might have picked flowers if her life had not been shattered by war. She was neat as well. Her knife flickered in the dim electric light, the blade glistening with blood, but barely a drop touched her clothes.

Jack did his share of killing that day, although mostly with his P90 rather than a knife. The noise was considerable – his silencer had long since worn out and he had used up all of his subsonic ammunition – but every time someone tried to use the sound as a guide to flank Jack's position, Lotte would materialise out of the air and they would drop to the floor with a slash of red spreading beneath their chin; most of the guards were busy at the gunports, firing out with Mausers and paratroop rifles.

Lotte headed for the front of the building, but Jack caught her arm. The knife lifted, but Jack took a step back until she grew calm. "We can't kill them all," he told her. "We have to let them in."

Lotte nodded.

At last they found the control room. Ahriman had gone low tech on this one and a cluster of huge chains linked the heavy steel doors to a set of massive counterweights. Jack looked the mechanism over quickly, and then fixed a small charge to the chain.

"Won't that jam the gate closed?" Lotte asked.

Jack shook his head. "Not the way this system has been set up. Set the gears" – he threw a few levers – "and cut that chain and the door will fly open. Cut the other and it will slam shut."

They retreated from the room and Jack set off the charge. The chains clattered and rattled, a broken link slamming hard against the door. A ragged cheer from the bandits drifted along the passageway, followed by angry shouts.

"I think they heard," Lotte noted.

Footsteps rattled along the passage behind them.

"Damn," Jack muttered. He leaned on the door to the chain room and it opened with some difficulty. "Inside!" he snapped.

The squeezed into the room and slammed the door closed behind them. With some effort they hefted a couple of the broken chain links against the door as an impromptu barricade. Jack went over to the chain hole and looked down. He took hold of the chain that still hung down through the hole and rattled it.

"Quick," he said. "There's no-one down there and you can squeeze through easily enough."

Lotte looked down into the narrow gap. "But what about you?" she asked.

"I'm a little wide in the shoulder. You go and come back for me."

Lotte nodded once. "Right," she agreed, but she was clearly reluctant to leave him.

"Find Rasputin and bring him back here," Jack suggested.

"Yes," she agreed, although if anything she seemed even more reluctant.

*

Duncan led his team out onto the gantry. The guards were in an uproar, firing up at the gallery which surrounded the room. In that gallery, Team one struggled their way under fire towards a small control room.

"We have to help them," Daniel insisted.

"We have to reach the rocket," Gretel returned.

"We can't do both?" Duncan asked. "Sally, Mathias you work your way around to Team one. Keeler; you and I will give suppressing fire, and Daniel and Gretel can try to reach the rocket and deal with this...difficulty."

Gretel nodded. "Sounds good to me," she agreed. "Daniel; shoes and socks."

"What?" Duncan asked.

"Just...accept," Daniel suggested. "Take your shoes and socks off, otherwise things could turn nasty."

 

The gunfire redoubled. Sam risked a glance at their attackers and saw several of them fall down.

"It is Major O'Neill," Teal'c explained.

"And Tom!" Amy declared, proudly.

Inge was bringing up the rear and so she heard the footsteps first. "Mathias and the other Dr Carter are coming up behind us."

Sam nodded. "Alright. We'll need their help to rush the control room. Just remember to watch where you're firing," she added. "If we're going to stop the rocket we need the controls intact and..." She fell silent, staring out across the chamber. On the gantry, two figures were sprinting along the gantry towards the rocket.

"Good grief," Sam sighed. The second runner was Daniel.

Alarms blared and the gantries began to swing away from the rockets. The leading figure, a dark-haired girl – "Gretel!" Amy exclaimed – hurled herself from the edge of the platform and clung to the rocket's dome like a spider. Daniel almost followed, but slid to a halt.

"Her feet!" Inge cried. "Look! Her feet!"

Sam followed Inge's finger and saw that Gretel was indeed barefoot.

"Oh no," she sighed. "Shoes and socks off. Now!"

*

Lotte slithered down the chain and dropped noiselessly to the floor. The sound of battle raged not far off and so she sheathed her knife and reached up for the MP40 that O'Neill lowered down to her. Her firearm of choice had once been a silence Sten gun, but they had never lasted more than a month and it had not been practical after she had left the resistance in Orlok.

She lifted her hand towards the door of the lower chain room and froze, transfixed by the splash of red blood across her skin. Her fingers clenched into a fist and she swallowed hard. She had once told Teal'c that she could not go back to killing, but in fact it had been easy. First in the depot at Castle Falkenstein and now here, she had killed and felt nothing; no shame, no remorse, and no triumph. When her family had been slaughtered, everything inside Lotte had frozen and it had taken the death of Pieter Lutz, a good and kind young Obergefreiter, to bring her back to life. It appalled her to think that his sacrifice had wrought so little change.

Lotte's hand began to shake and she was unable to stifle a sob.

"Lotte?" Jack called softly. "Is everything alright?"

Lotte dug her nails in the pad of her palm until they drew blood. The pain snapped her back to herself and she swallowed again, forcing her doubt and fear deep down inside her. "I'm alright," she called, her voice firm. "I'll do what needs to be done."

She opened the door and slipped out into an empty corridor. The din of battle led her to the right, towards the main gates. The automatic gunfire was fading now, being replaced by yells and the clash of steel, and occasionally the sharp crack of a pistol or rifle shot.

The corridor opened out into the main entrance hall. The gates stood open and the bandits had forced their way through. Now they were locked in close quarters with a tight knot of guards, while a second line of defenders waited with rifles to pick off any target that presented itself. Lotte emerged behind this second line and that part of her that was the Ghost took over at once.

She raked the line with fire from her MP40, killing five men and wounding three more; she felt no more guilt than if she had slapped a gnat against her skin. As the submachine gun clicked empty she threw herself at the one guard left standing. With her left hand she held the barrel of his rifle away from her, while the right drew her knife and slid it deftly in and out of his heart. The rifle went off and the heat of it burned her palm, but she kept a grip on the weapon as the man fell dead on the floor.

One of the wounded was still mobile and Lotte finished him with a blow from the rifle butt. Then she shouldered the weapon, chambered a round and fired into the back of one of the defenders. Coolly she fired again and a third time, before the rifle was empty and she abandoned it.

She drew her knife again and rushed into the fray, sliding the blade into the back of the largest of the defenders. She felt a slight resistance from the heavy fabric of his flak jacket, but the blade was still sharp. As the man fell, however, the knife caught in the jacket's weave; Lotte tried to twist it free, but the man's weight bore down across the blade and it snapped.

In desperation, Lotte followed the body down and groped for the bayonet at his belt. A shadow fell over her and she rose, the blade already beginning its deadly thrust as her head lifted and she saw Rasputin standing before her, his scimitar held in a loose grip and his hand reaching down to lift her to her feet.

Horror gripped her. She wanted to stop, but her instincts were all directed towards death; the quick kill, the sure, sudden strike. She could not more halt the thrust than she could have sprung from a ledge and stopped her fall part way. Rasputin would die on her blade, just like every other man who had tried to touch her.

Just like Pieter Lutz.

The knife flashed upwards.

*

Two guards held the door of the control room. They were tenacious and, although Sam's team suffered no injuries, they were held up for several minutes. The reason for this became clear when they entered the control room and saw a second door on the far side of the chamber.

"Ahriman must have split," Sam realised. "They were covering her escape."

"She could bring reinforcements," Teal'c noted.

"On it," Amy assured him. She took another device from her pack and slammed it against the door. It bit into the wood and metal spikes branched out to dig into the frame. "Overlock," she explained. "They'll need to tear the door apart to get through it, which at least gives us fair warning."

Sam checked the controls and gave a scream of frustration. "Locked!" she snapped. "We'll have to try and override Ahriman's security protocols before we can even attempt reprogramming."

"I guess that's us," Sally noted. "Dr Weiss?"

"If I can help, I shall," Inge promised.

Sam nodded her agreement. "Alright. Teal'c and Amy, pick up Tom and Major O'Neill and go with them to secure the area. It looks as though Daniel's made it back to them, so send him up here in case we need help with any linguistic ciphers."

Moonlight, hard and cold and white, stabbed down into the control room. Sam looked up and saw that the doors above the rocket were sliding open.

"And hurry," she said. "We don't have much time."

*

"I'm sorry," Lotte whispered, on the verge of tears.

"That's okay," Rasputin gasped. "I didn't do much with that hand anyway."

Her whole body was trembling, but she forced her muscles to obey her and looked down. With reflexes almost as swift as hers, Rasputin had managed to block the killing thrust, but at a cost: the blade now transfixed his left hand.

"Oh!" Lotte gasped.

Rasputin slid his scimitar back into its scabbard. He lifted his left hand, gripped the hilt of the knife and tugged it free. His blood splashed across the flagstones and Lotte gave a small cry. With an obvious effort, Rasputin curved his fingers into a fist and then relaxed them again.

"No permanent harm done," he assured her. "Are _you_ alright?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Oh, yes." Impulsively, she kissed him. "I...I'm scared and horrified and sick to my stomach."

"That sounds terrible."

She shook her head. "It's _wonderful_ ," she assured him.

Marius gave a soft cough. "Ah, Khan?"

"Yes?"

"The guards are all dead or captured," Marius reported. "What do we do now?"

"Can we close the gates?" Rasputin asked Lotte. "Reinforcements will not be long in coming."

Lotte nodded. "We have to get back to the chain room!" she gasped. "I had almost forgotten; Colonel O'Neill is trapped. But from there we can close the gates."

Rasputin nodded. "Marius, keep your group here; hold this gate well. We shall close it as soon as we may and then return." Absentmindedly he wound a handkerchief around his injured hand.

Marius nodded. "Yes, my Khan."

"Then lead the way, my Khadun," Rasputin told Lotte.

*

Daniel watched anxiously as Gretel crawled across the nosecone of the rocket and grasped the wheel of the hatch.

"Have you felt this before?" he asked Sam.

Sam nodded distractedly. "It'll be new to Mathias and Sally though; they've only seen the aftermath."

"Pfronten?" Daniel asked.

Sam nodded again, but most of her concentration was on the controls. "I'm sorry, Daniel," she sighed. "I know it's been a long time. Three years...I can hardly believe...but I have to crack this security code before the rocket launches or the world is going to end." She flashed him a grin. "Without wishing to sound melodramatic."

"God forbid. Let me have a look," he added. "You know how the Goa'uld can be with their mythic codes." He took a seat at the control desk, just as Gretel swung the hatch open.

The black light of Dahak washed through the control room, swamping the moonlight entirely. Sam and Teal'c's field radios began to squeal and hiss angrily.

Mathias and Sally recoiled in alarm.

"Good God!" Sally cried. She lifted her hands to her temples. "It's...It's in my head," she gasped. "I can feel it."

"Feet flat on the stone floor," Sam advised. "If you're standing on the carpet you'll probably try to kill us all."

"Uh...right."

"So that's Dahak?" Mathias asked. "The spirit of pure evil?"

"Well, pure chaos," Daniel corrected. "Evil is too sophisticated a word for Dahak." His voice trembled as he recalled the feeling of Dahak's power surging directly through his body, with his brain being used to focus the energy.

"Daniel?" Sam asked, concerned.

"It...It's nothing," he lied. "Hah!" As Daniel cried out in triumph, the cathode ray screens on the control panels lit up and a teleprinter cracked into life. "Zoroastrian scripture; almost too easy."

"Don't say things like that," Mathias warned. "That... _woman_ is not to be underestimated. Believe me, I know her better than I'd like to."

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, better than you do."

"Wanna bet?" Daniel challenged with a pained expression on his face.

Mathias groaned. "Oh, that is just wrong in so many ways."

"Damnit!" Sam snapped.

"What is...Damnit!" Sally echoed. "We've got no time to do anything; the rocket will launch in ten seconds!"

*

With a solid crash the great doors swung closed, the steel bending with the force of the impact. The bandits pulled back a short way into the foyer and waited until their chief returned. After a while they started growing fractious and it was only the ingrained dependence and trust that they had been forced to develop that prevented them attacking one another outright. Even this would not have held for long, but fortunately Jack knew the drill; as soon as he felt the rising rage he had told Lotte and Rasputin to shed their boots. On their return to the main hall, Rasputin led the way and moved among his men, touching each one so that the rage could bleed out through him.

It took a little while, but eventually everyone was persuaded to go barefoot and order was returned to the bandit crew.

"Right," Rasputin said. "Now we've got that out of the way, it's time to mop this lot up. Four teams; we sweep right along the main corridor and out into the galleries around that central chamber; sweep up all the resistance we come across and secure the area completely. Marius, take your group left and I'll go right. Split into two teams when you reach the next junction, but don't _split_ up any further. We'll meet up on the far side of the central chamber and can someone _please_ tell me why my hair is standing on end."

There was a momentary pause as each of the bandits realised that their hair was also standing on end. Then Jack said: "Magnets."

Rasputin frowned at him. "Eh?"

"The ship is launched using really big electromagnets. The fields from those magnets must be ionising the air in the bunker."

Rasputin looked at Lotte, who shrugged helplessly. "We'll take your word for it," she decided.

*

Daniel held his breath until it began to get uncomfortable. "Is it me?" he asked. "Or is this the longest ten seconds ever?"

Sally checked the screen. "That can't be right," she said. "The countdown is at eighteen minutes. It was at ten seconds, I know it was."

"I tried to stop it," Sam agreed, "but there's no cancellation control. The Goa'uld don't admit to mistakes, so why have an override?"

"But there _is_ a master clock," Inge said.

Sam looked around. "Inge? Where are you?"

"Under the desk," Inge replied, although she emerged even as she said it. "The interface may be Goa'uld, but the clock itself is old-fashioned quartz technology. I just reset it. It doesn't look as though we could halt the countdown without triggering either the launch or some manner of booby trap, but we should be able to keep on resetting it every twenty minutes until we get this sorted out."

"Ingenious," Sally said approvingly.

"Very clever," Sam added grudgingly.

"Ooo, somebody's jealous," Sally teased.

"Grandma!"

"Seventeen minutes and counting," Daniel reminded them.

"Thank you, Daniel," Sam said. "We have a little time now to try and override the controls. I guess your friend there is locking down the Casket itself, so as long as we can send the rocket into a wide orbit, we can make the final arrangements in our own time when we have access to spaceships and I am not jealous!"

Mathias groaned. "Is this going to run and run?" he asked.

Daniel shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think she's ever met anyone as smart as her before."

"The real trouble is that our only way back is through that Casket," Sam admitted, trying to ignore the jibes of her colleagues. "If your friend seals it up completely..."

As though on cue, the black light shut off. The screaming static on the radio cut out and a tinny voice could be heard.

" _Come in, SG-1. Please respond_."

"Dr Markova!" Daniel gasped.

"Of course," Sam laughed. "That's it! Daniel; stop that woman closing the outer seals."

Daniel sighed. He left the control room and leaned out over the railings. "Gretel!" he yelled. "Gretel! Can you leave the outer seals open! We need to get home!"

There was a short pause, before Gretel called back: "Alright! But can you hurry up a little, because my arms are getting tired."

"I'll try and put the gantries back," Daniel promised.

*

_2001_

Markova waited impatiently for there to be any further response from SG-1. After a moment, Karpova's radio crackled.

" _We're almost ready to go here,_ " Smith reported. " _How are things at your end?_ "

"Static-y," Karpova replied. "How's it with you?"

The voice that answered was Djerovich's. " _He's been tinkering with that thing in the tunnel. It's...humming._ "

" _Don't worry about that,_ " Smith assured them. " _That's just the power core reaching fusion_."

" _I'm sorry. Did you say fusion?_ "

There was a pause. " _Yes_."

"Would that be nuclear fusion?" Markova asked.

Karpova shrugged. "Is that nuclear fusion?" she asked.

" _You know of another kind?_ "

" _I think I'm going to head back and see if Karpova's okay_ ," Djerovich said.

" _Great. You can help me carry this thing; it needs to be in the main chamber anyway_."

Karpova stifled a giggle.

"Why laugh?" Markova asked. "Whatever this thing is, it's coming here. Come in, SG-1. Please respond," she called again, without much hope.

" _Dr Markova; we're here,_ " Sam Carter said.

"Finally! Okay, Dr Carter; what do you need?"

*

_1944_

Jack arrived as the gantry was rattling back into place around the rocket.

"Hey, Daniel!" Jack called. "Long time, no see!"

Daniel grinned. "I make it a couple of weeks. What's it for you?"

"A whole year. Carter and Teal'c have three."

"They look good on it," Daniel replied. "Come on; Sam's got a shot for home."

"Yes!" Jack declared. "Let's move." He followed Daniel to the control room door, sparing barely a glance at the rocket. "Who's the brunette?" he asked.

"Ah...That's Gretel," Daniel replied.

Jack shot him a look. "Is this going to be one of those things you tell me about later so as to avoid arguments, and then I get really angry?"

"Yes."

"Well, just so as I know."

 

"So, this is how I see it," Sam explained. "In order to create a stable passageway linking any two space-time locations through the Dahak tesseract, there needs to be a tether. Safe passage is possible with only one tether – an energy source at one end of the portal – but in order to make an _accurate_ trip you have to have a receiving station, beaming out a homing signal."

Amy nodded. "That's how our recall system works," she agreed, producing a silver device. "The master transponder at HQ sent a constant signal through the portal to guide us home. We just needed to hit the button and we were gone."

"Now, we don't have a master transponder," Sam went on, "but Dr Markova is in place in our time – about nine days after we left – to give us a radio signal to track through the vortex."

"But how do we get into the vortex?" Jack asked. "The seals are closed."

"The recall devices can still create a re-entry port," Amy assured him. "The trouble is that we only have two."

"We have three," Sam assured her. "We got one from another time traveller we ran into." She was proud of how steady she kept her voice, considering that the recall device had come from the body of a duplicate of Daniel Jackson.

"That still leaves us one short," Jack noticed.

"It shouldn't matter," Sam assured him. "Four would be better, but we don't need one each. The vortices should reinforce one another and take us all together."

"The trouble is that it gets fiddly with the mass involved," Inge said. "The greater the travelling mass, the higher the temporal inertia and momentum and the greater the energy needed to move into and out of the tesseract. It is leaving that will be most difficult. The number of recall devices is a small problem compared to that of the lack of a beacon at the far end."

" _If it helps, we have a beacon for you_ ," Markova noted.

Sam shared baffled glances with her grandmother and then lifted her radio. "Say again; you have a beacon?"

" _Affirmative. A man called Smith seems to have cobbled it together using parts stolen from the facility here_."

"Smith?" Sam asked.

A new voice came on the channel. " _Chief Petty Officer, Royal Navy. Is that the 103 rd Bleeding Obvious?_"

Teal'c grinned. "CPO Smith, it is good to hear your voice. I had thought you surely dead."

" _You and me both, mate, but lucky old Smithy, the temporal potential from your transference to my time left a trail and I fell all the way back to_ almost _your time_. _They say._ "

"That is why you disappeared instead of being destroyed!" Inge realised. "Of course; and you found yourself in the future?"

" _Right you are, love. And now it's time for Smithy to come home. Apparently if I use this gizmo here to project myself into the vortex at the same moment – if we can call it such – as you, the mass transfer will make sure that I end up where you leave off,_ and _compensate for the lack of power at your end._ "

Teal'c frowned. "We do not wish you to risk yourself for our sakes," he said.

" _Happy to help, me old son_ ," Smith assured him. " _Besides, I got a war to win, a Fraulein to make into a Frau and I need to spend a few days with your boffins there, working out what to put into the letters and plans I'm going to send to myself to pick up when I arrive here, four years ago, if you follow me._ "

"As closely as I need to."

" _Right then. If that's decided, I'll fire up the beacon. You let me know when you've said your goodbyes._ "

*

_2001_

"It all seems so unlikely," Karpova said.

"That's as maybe," Smith replied, "but it's so nonetheless. Hey; you got that letter, Doc?"

Markova nodded. "Yes. I made sure that I didn't copy, but it's word for word."

"'Course it is," Smith laughed.

"What letter?" Djerovich asked.

Karpova laughed out loud. "The letter that Rasputina brought her when we arrived. It was from you!" she accused.

"Guilty," Markova admitted, "although at the time I hadn't written it." She handed the envelope to Smith. "Good luck, Chief," she said.

"And you, Ma'am."

*

_1944_

Jack looked around at his strange group of allies. "We'd better not be in here when we go; you might need to use the controls and I don't want any accidents. Carter, anything you need to do before you go?"

"Dr Carter and I can handle the controls," Inge assured him. "Major Carter has given us all the instructions we will need."

Jack looked at her in silence struggling to find the right words. "You could come with us," he suggested.

Inge shook her head. "This is my time. Besides, excess mass will just make the trip more difficult."

"You're not excess mass," Jack assured her. He took a step toward Inge and she turned away.

"Don't make this difficult, Jack. If I come, we will all die; if I stay, we will live, I am sure of it."

"Maybe in the future..."

"Please don't," Inge interrupted. "I don't think that I could bear it."

 

Sam was saying goodbye to her grandmother. "Now, remember," she said, "you mustn't tell him too much; just enough to get us home. And you have to be careful to..."

Sally laid a finger on Sam's lips. "Shh," she chided. "It's alright. I understand. I promise, Sam, that I will never blame you."

Sam swallowed hard. "For...For what?"

"For whatever it is that you can not tell me about."

Sam began to cry.

 

"Well," Mathias said. "Give my love to your father."

Daniel could not meet his gaze.

"Ah. I...I won't ask for any more. I don't think I want to know."

Daniel's face was bleak. "I wish I had the option."

 

"Will you look after Inge?" Jack asked.

"If she'll let me," Duncan replied. "Although I don't think she needs much taking care of. Maybe she did once, but not now."

Jack nodded. "Look out for Amy and Tom as well, if you could. I think they're good kids at heart. I'm sure your bosses could find a use for them."

Duncan laughed. "If they're good kids I'll keep them the hell away from my boss," he promised.

 

"I need to ask you a favour," Daniel admitted.

"Anything," Amy assured him.

"Magda and Lisl," Daniel explained. "Find them. Look after them. I don't know if Ahriman will have stopped to collect them, but I can't bear the thought of leaving them with her."

Amy nodded her head. "You got it. Tom and I'll find them and treat ‘em as their own."

"Thank you, Amy." Daniel kissed her cheek affectionately. "You're the best."

Amy watched as he walked away and tears sprang into her eyes.

"What's the matter?" Tom asked, moving close and putting an arm around her shoulders.

"I really hate that bitch," Amy whispered. "The other Amy," she added, nestling her head against her lover's shoulder. "Maybe they were never lovers, but he never loved me like he loves her."

Tom kissed the top of her head. "Different Amy, different Daniel. Would you swap places with her?"

Amy shook her head. "No. She doesn't have you."

 

"Time to go, kids!" Jack called.

SG-1 gathered on the gantry in front of the rocket. The rest of the teams had gathered in the control room.

Sam lifted the radio. "We're ready. Send the signal."

At once the recall devices held by Sam, Jack and Daniel – Jack had insisted he be the one without, but Teal'c had stared him down – began to pulse.

"On three," Jack said. "Ready, Smith?"

" _Ready._ "

"You know," Daniel said, "we're about to send this thing into space, yet there it is in our own time. On Earth."

"Right," Jack agreed. "So, first thing we do when we get home, we find out who brought it back to Earth and we kick their asses. One, two, thr..."

Three thumbs pressed three buttons. The steel of the gantry seemed to warp and buckle inwards as the air around SG-1 bent and rippled. Then, with an ear-splitting silence, the three men and one woman spun away into nothingness. All was still for a moment, then there was a soft _pht_ and a man tumbled onto the gantry.

"CPO Smith?" Duncan called.

"None other!" Smith replied. "So; what do we do now?"

*

_2001_

SG-1 clung together as they tumbled through the tesseract, feeling their bodies stretched and compressed almost beyond endurance. At last they saw the pinprick of light and they tumbled, aching and dizzy onto the floor of the bunker they had just left.

Jack looked up and waited for the roof to stop spinning. As it slowed, a grinning face appeared.

"Welcome to Siberia," Dr Markova said.

"Hi," Jack replied. "So...Who gets to explain this one to our bosses?"

*

_1944_

The bunker was burning merrily as the bandits led their allies away to their main camp. Unlike the farmhouse, which had been a mere weapon's dump, this was a full-fledged settlement. Women and children emerged to greet the bandits and, in some cases, to bear their loved ones away for burial.

Once they had bathed and rested, the Cataclysm team were brought to Rasputin's tent to dine and confer with their allies. Lotte sat beside the bandit Khan and they gazed soulfully – but not productively – into each other's eyes. Sally and Mathias whispered together while Duncan picked at a plate of what he hoped was stringy beef; Inge was lost in her own melancholy thoughts and Gretel was wolfing down stew as though she had not eaten in a week. Tom sat with a hand on Amy's arm, while she stared despondently into the fire.

It was Amy who spoke first. "I promised to look after them," she announced in a flat tone.

"It's not your fault," Mathias assured her. "Ahriman was long gone by the time you even made that promise." He did not sound happy with the outcome.

"I'll find her," Gretel assured them. "I have to go after Ahriman and when I find her, I will contact you and let you know where the children are. You have not failed them yet, Amy."

"We'll come with you," Amy insisted.

Gretel shook her head. "I travel faster alone; just let me know where I can contact you."

"We'll handle that," Duncan offered. "We can get you back to the States and set you up," he promised, "then we all need to keep our eyes and ears open."

Sally nodded slowly. "We talked about this earlier," she explained. "Mathias, Duncan and I. We can't make our knowledge of the Goa'uld public without damaging the fabric of history, but we can't just pretend we don't know. We've already seen that we are going to make preparations to aid our grandchildren."

"Good kids," Duncan added, "even if Daniel did inherit Mathias' lack of taste in women."

"See if you get invited round for dinner," Mathias groused.

"Actually, it's probably best if you don't," Sally noted. "At least not very often. Do I speak for us all when I say that we intend to do all that we can to bring Ahriman and Iblis to justice?"

There was a general chorus of nods and assents.

"Well, then we should take it as read that Ahriman will be after us. We shouldn't make it too easy for her to find us all. I have a basic strategy in mind," Sally went on. "The three of us are pretty high in military intelligence; Nicolai Tevyavich has some criminal contacts..."

"Less of the ‘some'," Rasputin protested. "I'm not some penny-ante bandit boyar, you know."

"Inge has – or will have, I should say – a lot of scientific clout..."

Inge blushed.

"And Gretel, Kawalsky and Keeler are ideal field agents." Sally took a deep breath. She looked as though she were having trouble believing that she was about to say what she was about to say.

"Just spit it out, Sally."

"We have the makings of an international conspiracy."

*

_2001 – Some days later_

Jack struggled up out of sleep to the ringing of his telephone. After a dozen briefings, debriefings, interrogations, intimidations and harassments, from everyone from the Special Projects Division to the Special Directorate for ESPionage to the customs and immigration authorities, the NID and the SGC, Jack had fallen asleep as soon as he had been allowed to come home. He had barely made it into bed.

He was sorely tempted to leave the phone on the hook, but from the way it kept ringing he did not think that the caller would give up.

"What?" he mumbled into the earpiece. When a tinny voice started babbling at his chin he turned the handset over. "What?" he mumbled again.

" _I hate her._ "

There was a long pause. "Carter?"

" _Colonel._ "

"Why the hell aren't you asleep?"

" _I wanted to know if we'd changed anything much_ ," Sam explained. " _I've been doing a little research_."

"And?"

" _1963, Nobel Prize for Physics._ "

"Hmm?"

" _Carter, Kawalsky and Wise. Work on high-energy transference in superconducting media._ "

Jack sighed. "It's four in the morning, Carter," he groaned.

" _Actually it's a quarter past five._ "

"What are you talking about, Carter?" Jack demanded. "Why are you calling me to brag about your grandmother's hitherto unsung achievements?"

There was a pause and Jack could picture the impatient frown on Sam's face.

"What am I missing?"

" _Wise_ ," Sam replied.

Jack sat up in his bed. "You think...?"

" _Dr Inge Wise, of highly questionable past,_ " Sam explained. " _You saved her life and she won a Nobel Prize_."

Jack chuckled.

" _Sir?_ "

"There's more, isn't there?"

" _Well..._ "

Jack laughed out loud. "Your grandmother never won a Nobel Prize before, did she?"

" _No_ ," Sam fumed, " _and neither did Dr Stephan Kawalsky_. _Now it turns out that I referenced their papers when I was making the Stargate function._ "

"Good old Inge," Jack sighed. "I told you she'd come through."

" _That you did_ ," Carter admitted grudgingly. " _There's a son_ ," she added. " _Grandchildren now._ "

"She got married?"

There was a long, long pause.

"Carter?"

" _She never married. The son was born in 1945_."

"Oh."

" _Would you like to..._ "

"No!" Jack snapped. "No," he repeated more gently. "There's nothing I could say or do, is there. It's...It's good to know, though; that I'm not quite the last of the Mohicans." He sighed. "Of course, what she really wanted to be was a poet."

The dead air on the phone line was heavy with envy. "Carter?"

" _Literature, 1971_."

Jack chuckled. "Goodnight, Carter," he said.

" _Goodnight, sir._ "

Jack hung the phone up and rolled onto his back. He lay there for a long time, with a smile on his face and tears rolling slowly down his cheeks.


End file.
